Truck

Steve Belasco:

Five Odd Reflections on Memory

On time

And Death

1.

At the end of them

Thirty years compact

In that black hole

Where gravity depraved

De-sequences 

Their time

When time is all they are.

Nothing escapes

Black hole time -

It has its own; and

Lusts to own it all.

It will,

And at the end of them

Thirty years will

Effervesce

Be timeless

Be nothing

Be only

The memory you make of them

In that black hole

Where you would

Pick up pieces of them

If there were some.

2.

Years get counted

At the end:

The incomplete

Get no credit.

Obituaries never

Note the months, the days:

Don’t number the last hours.

The time you last

Will be an integer.

Halfway, most,

Notions for poems

Do not count.

In the insignificance

Of months,

Of days, of hours, minutes

Of efforts and attempts

Of all the almost done

We find uncounted

Coins too few

To matter much

Like small remainders

In results of long division:

Unsatisfactory but there.

3.

I store moments

In a glass jar

Like collected coins

And have them

Where I can see them

Even reach in

And feel how many there are

And how surprisingly

Similar they feel

Their faces

The inscriptions

The raised edges

Wearing away

With each touch

Sounding

Like water

Lapping gravel

The moments

Smoothed past recognition

And past

Distinction.

4.

Intermittently at night

The dead email

Me brief

Apologies

About mistakes

They made attaching

Photographs

Of stuff that never happened.

Muscleless they can’t

Shampoo the mud

They tracked on carpet

That I’ve since replaced;

They write instead

With typos and want

Understanding or

To blame the pet.

Face down flat

Blindly they reach back

As best the dirt load

Lets them

And even after they’ve been eaten

Past the fingers

Their message lingers.

I won’t reply.

I won’t disturb

The misery that binds us.

No forgiveness

Better than forgetting. 

And soon enough

They will stop writing.

5.

May is a good month for lawns

On my block.  They’re spread

Out like dry goods at market

And tempt you to lift the edge

And feel them between your fingers.

They are made right here,

The techniques passed down,

Though these days there’s power

Instead of push

And few are handmade.

Old timers will tell you on weekends

You could hear blades shuttle

Rising and falling

All over the neighborhood

Like orchestrated looms

And sniff the leakage from slit grass

Its heavy tang where fumes

Now rise off the motor boat beat

Of one-pistoned four wheelers

Wrangled by masked Mexicanos.

These days the edges

Trim quick and rectilinear

Where once it took

Hand clippers and snips

To correct grass that went too far.

And it’s every day of the week

Now neighborhood samurai

No longer reach into the folds of garages

And Saturdays unleash curved blades

On lawns and by noon

Have left only traces

Of green stain and severed

Fingers of motionless grass

Littered about for honor,

The dignity of order

And the neighborhood.