by Kurt Brown
The
deeper we move into the future, the more we disappear into the past,
that ghost ship
manned
by family and friends, whole neighborhoods, villages,
vast cities
or hunks of them like waxen combs broken
off and taken in, their human cargo
thriving,
who inhabit now the body’s cells, its
nerveways and staterooms, open decks,
catwalks,
a grand ballroom filled with light
slipping softly past the farthest capes.
*
Blink
the face of Jack Harrington, lean, moronic, eight years old, leers at
me,
wiry
hair,
loud hoarse voice—like someone accustomed
to yelling—his flesh already pitted,
already
old,
dressed in bargain-basement rags,
chicken-breasted torso splayed with ribs.
Blink
Nancy Bergen, pale face sown with
freckles, green eyes, red hair swept backward
in
a ponytail
blooms in frosty light, as her breath
bloomed, once, in the scintillant air of morning.
*
The way out is the way in, as if the
whole project of living were to gather light
that
leaps
off the surface of the world to scorch
its image on the soul—
that
cave
we crawl into after millennia, inscribed
with all we’ve ever witnessed,
all
we’ve known.
Blink
again, the solemn face
of a teacher hovers over my desk where I labor
sweating
answers
on the thin blue staves of a test book
open to a blank page in nineteen fifty nine.
*
Is it true that we remember everything
that ever happened to us—every gesture,
every
act,
each person and the words they spoke, the
landscape of a certain country,
or
a state,
how our bodies felt when we were twelve?
That summer I fell in love
and
my limbs
glowed. One morning I woke in snow and
the world seemed dirty and closed,
a
secret
I might never crack. Is it true the mind
is endless, a lifetime lodged forever in its folds?
*
Someone’s weeping in the middle of the
night. The light’s on. I rouse myself from sleep
to
find my mother
sitting on a chair inside my room. Her
sister’s dead, lost in a car crash at the other end
of
the country.
The call came in, incomprehensible, late.
Go back to sleep, she says, and I do.
But
not before
a woman I hardly knew enters my head,
lies with me an hour in the dark,
becomes
part of my life
at the end of hers. I feel her stretch
and settle in, bury herself in the dark continent of my brain.
*
Stand on this cape—it’s the last one, the
one that juts out into fathomless night.
Out
there
a life passes, smoothly cleaving waves,
all its gangways blazing.
The dead
fill every window, and the not-forgotten
throng high decks, immutable, waving
their arms.
there’s
Gary Woodman, still coughing, lungs withered by a childhood disease.
Blink,
Mandy Strawbridge bares her teeth, skin
so luminous and perfect she can never die.