Here's an interesting poem I just found:
Red Memory Number One
Nothing is real in a past you tinker with so much
it's as unknowable as what's ahead,
a system of streets all converging in a star at your feet.
Driving the thoroughfare, you describe turrets and cul-de-sacs,
moldings shaped like animals, the small inert fruit trees.
A break in the skyline allows you to see the river,
sunlight on the water making you think of red ice, red winter.
There was fire in the distance, controlled fire, in barrels
burning red-hot light. You couldn't work by this distant light,
but it was the little bearing the evening was willing to grant you
as you lifted the sacks Dad wanted put up in the icehouse.
The past is your father, the late hour masquerading as your father.
Humming a song somehow behind it all, you made sure
everything was right, rearranging bags you had heaved onto the floor.
In the exhaustion you imagined pigs doped inert for shipping.
You wondered why they didn't moan as you loaded them.
The cold had chapped your face by then,
so you invited the little piggies to occupy your red face,
suckle its red loneliness. You invited your father's tone of voice
to see if you could, to see if you could stand it, to berate the pigs
for witnessing the wrathful panic of your father's towering there
to verify that you weren't up to the task, didn't respect
the same things your father did, like red winter and stoic quiet.
The sky was red with suffering, which you were sure
was more than just your own selfish view of things.
Richard Lyons
The Gettysburg Review
Volume 15, Number 2
Summer 2002 |
