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Sport 14: Autumn 1995

Notes From the Elastic Memory

page 43

Notes From the Elastic Memory

1. 36 Arthur Street

The sun is bored.
It grows heavy and orange
and drowns itself in the horizon.

A hawk rises clumsily
from a tree,
cursing those that disturbed it,
its black print frayed at the edges.

The girl has left her thought here,
mingled with the crispness of
the evening’s ghost,
mingled with the pictures
she glances at in memory.
Dandelions grow like a meadow
and she hides in every sticky petal.

When my family had worn themselves into the house, we left it and let your family fill it up. I was not aware of ‘things’ then, thinking that when we visited again the rooms would be the same. My body changed the whole place for me, it grew up and cannot hold my little-girl nostalgia so convincingly. I say the house looks smaller, but it is me who is bigger, and I have no words to account for this strangeness.

I left my first conscious thought on the doorstep of that house; staring at my scraped knee and blue sneaker, my mother called my name. I remember the grey concrete footpath and my dirty laces but they blur into other pictures, and are ultimately never as clear as this one.

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2. Visiting

The house is a set of gates,
people-gates
and you sit uneasy
in your chair
squashed by clothes
in a shrunken body.

You have other companions:
glass of water
and a tissue
and us
cross-legged on the floor
in the white-curtained room.

The children wander
with teddy-bear eyes
lost in the legs of visitors.

You say that word
you say Cancer
and it comes out of your mouth
like a black-glassed friend,
another companion to perch on your arm.

3. Beyond Time

Nobody knows I am like this. If I open my mouth and let people look down my throat, they will see the black of me, they will see I have no colour and if I turn myself inside out I will completely disappear.

Inside you is colour. You have it in your voice, I think that it is red, like the bleeding of an oak tree.

Beyond time is sleep and the swollen atmosphere of Goodbye. Finality. Incoherence. The cancer is approaching its end, it crept at first, afraid page 45 someone might see it and stop it, but now it is arrogant and it runs, it stamps, it pokes out its tongue. Still it is reaching its end and it has not won and it will not win so long as the children come and go and an oak tree wears just that shade of red.

I have a photo of a friend at home, and in the background is a man sitting at a desk, leaning over, writing. He is smudged out of recognition, but I know his beard and his turquoise shirt. I don’t look at the precise focused image of my friend, but at the man, writing, the blur that is not meant to be there.

One day I will have blurred your memory until it is as blurred as your picture. Each time I think of you and dredge up an image of your face, it augments a little more. I am only allowed to remember it a certain number of times. My memory is not a film or a photo, but is elastic and changes shape every time I put it on.

4. Beyond Death

Five seagulls flew over in a group, I looked up and their wing-beats cooled my eyes. And I asked ‘where are you now?’

I leave that thought there, with you looking at it, a little puzzled, unsure of where to put your mouth.