I spent quality time after her memorial

reinventing banalities.
The absoluteness of her being

here, then ™Photoshopped out.   
What is it that anyone

remembers? Most of the speakers
were not and could not be

eloquent. Everyone nibbled 
at the borders of her life

and of the unspoken.
Nothing scandalous–just

you can’t articulate it, any
of it, either in part

or as a whole.
Of course, memory itself

is one culprit:  iterations,
inventions, re-castings, thoughts

escaped, home movies, rifts,
pretensions, chains, scraps of fabric

and frozen evanescence.  
                              Did you so believe in soul?

I didn’t know! I thought the word was odd—.
Someone stripped away the black

of the beleaguered words, 
to reveal the shadows

beneath their nakedness.
The heavy doors of travel

pivoted on hinges and turning points.
Sometimes hinges make a sound

like vermin. The mist
between landmarks encouraged earworms.

A Chopin étude, caught in a loop
and never resolved.

Or the “Chiquita banana” ditty,
pert, didactic, unforgettable,

a Potemkin village of kitchen pleasantries,
stereotypes and housewife-ry

under which tentacles
of collusion, massacre, preferential

access, policed economies,
and paramilitary activities

far away from home.
You can see right away there are

                two stories—the palpable, but insignificant

                                and the hidden, real enough but all obscured.

What? That number is patently

                ridiculous. Two says nothing. It’s wrong already.

                                It’s certainly simultaneous conflicting,

overloaded presences of “story,” crossroads, the honey of personal life,

                one tiny part of a well-built honeycomb,

                                done beautifully, with compassion,

                                          sweetness, and the rocks onto which

some jump or fall–all that

                narrates nothing, all that loses everything,

                though a number like two or three might do to symbolize this

                       so long as one doesn’t forget intricacy and the networks

of collusion, themselves limiting us to the

                binary, the trifecta, the 4 cardinal points of mists

                                neatening or sweetening all of it, the lot.
Time’s pale light upon the trees blinded the viewer

as the rushing stream rushed on.
Of course we spoke

awkwardly, a translation
without an original.

How could we have not?
2.
The poem, unwritten, is concealed by the poem, written.

It’s kind of a disgrace.

There is a lot of blank paper in this notebook.

Perhaps it should be left there, empty.

Time is gone, emphatically lost.

Its feeling tone

persists.
That’s what you say

because you want to say it–but

does it really?
Perhaps there is no choice.

This unwritten–reliably as

a force that unwrites itself–

creates spray and backwash,

recriminations in the holes and crevices

that fill, some seasons,

with the powerfully dangerous tide

of what some person meant to do

and did

not.
Especially sediments of unfinished

stories, eroded stories–
Any solid page of print

is a bluff–or I guess, that

is art.
It should truly be full of

ripped paper, holes,

elisions, burns

white spaces

and actually
emptiness.