October 15th, 2011

…is the title of a poem I wrote about a dream I had a few weeks ago. There’s something of approaching winter in it, so it is appropriate to the season. I’ve been wrestling with ideas about death and identity in the section of Purgatory I’m currently working on, and I think they surfaced and started to come together here. I read the poem out loud for the first time at the Flynndog last night, at the reconvening after too many months’ suspension of the poetry group that meets there. The group was in hiatus while the restaurant space in which we gather changed hands. Only five were in attendance, far outnumbered by the accompanying beer bottles, but they seemed to like this poem. I don’t think their positive reaction was altogether due to the beer, although in the case of one of them it may have influenced the degree of his enthusiasm. I don’t think I’ve ever been thanked quite so effusively before. Certainly not for so dark a poem. And so, without further ado:

In my dream, and a short while after awakening,
I could not remember your name.
I remembered the turrets of your nipples
atop your slackened breasts that day you lay
dozing on the rocks high above the quarry
where people swam, that day we first met.
I remembered the complex curves of your abdomen,
a concavity running each side of your convex belly,
the ridges and peaks of your hips cradling
your gingery thatch, and the years I wandered those hills,
first in joy and then sometimes in desperation.
I remembered your snaggle-toothed grin and your
googly eyes that seemed to me and still seem to me
beautiful, and I remembered your decision,
gratefully ratified, to abort our child.

I remembered so much – our fights and of course
what followed them; your passionate intelligence;
the day I came to live in your town and you
inscrutably turned your back on me; your shoulder blades
sharp as knives or wings, square as cinder blocks;
part of your chest brushing part of my chest when you
slowly turned back to me, crying – but
I could not remember your name.
To each memory, I could not put a name.
I told myself each time that even so, missing only
a set of syllables meaningless in itself, I still held
the better part of whatever I could ever hold of you;
and then by straining to call your name, helpless
not to, as helpless as not to take a breath, I denied it,
and I cursed the sky and the worms that devour us.

Tags: poem, Seth Steinzor, Vermont author
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