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Nostalgia is enemy of amnesia,
but I know which I’d choose given the choice.
We take pictures of ourselves as evidence that we existed on that day,
on that day we mattered — here’s the proof.
I want to erase it all.
I want to fragment my memory until I can’t pick out a face or place,
make a cracked mirror out of my past and present until time’s spiral
Is a ball of knotted string.
On the operating table my hands are upside down umbrellas
catching rainwater in its cradle.
My heart a plastic radio repeating the shipping forecast,
a storm foreboding, both feet
contain black holes swallowing floors,
my kneecaps are happy to meet you.
My outstretched arms say I’m always smiling -
it’s a cruel joke with no punchline.
My body is this photograph documenting my time,
but the hairline fractures in my psyche
make me delete all the evidence
as a monument to nothingness.
So why do I keep making art?
Am I the appropriation of my own image?
What are you supposed to do
when you look like your own doppelganger,
and you can’t tell the difference
between presence and presentation?
The poem as a photograph
is proof, illustrative evidence.
To collect poems
is to collect the world.
I am the cartographer of the silhouette
in the doorway
In the mirror
just behind you
This body is a document
a less treacherous form of leaching.
It shows how the past happened
and how the present can be reached.
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Our tree was the right kind of oak
upon which the starling never flapped its wings.
How could it, it was locked away
like a reluctant eulogy penned
in a closet in the kitchen.
A defensive bird, still in shock,
its chest heaving in an effort
to inhale or exhale,
and the smell of its feathers
when touched, moved on me like skin at a party,
until the entire sky opened up
and the top third of the tree fell onto our roof.
I heard the bird’s voice
in the back of the kitchen
like a terrible mistake.
It said beware of those people,
they are not good people.
The bird knows you.
Then a thing, so small, flew into its beak,
so small that for a few seconds
the bird kept its beak closed,
not knowing what it wanted,
so the thing stayed in its head and grew bigger and bigger
and the bird began to eat its own skull
from within, one small bite at a time
the way if you hold a match to your ear
you can hear how soft your skull is.
And then one day it had consumed most of it
and it was ready for someone to finish the job
and gave the skull to another bird,
another starling, and it put the skull down and ate it.
Every time I came home from work I saw the bird
flying up to its window and looking at me
from the branch like a man who had lost his memory.
Its body a tattered sack – its face hollow
from missing a skull to hold it.
But this is where the bird sang,
its voice like the sound of a train in winter over a river.
It sang so much that anytime it was silent
I thought it was a ghost.
It sang as the train’s sound became the forest’s
and I thought about all the things I had done
and was going to do,
and it sang and it sang,
and no one was more grateful for the train
and for the sounds and smell of the trees
and for the things that I had taken from them,
which no one could ever take away from me
and so the bird sang and the trees sang.
It was hard to believe
but the bird, the leaves, the grass sang,
the trees sang, the sun sang, the wilderness sang,
the moon sang, and the stars sang.
When all was said and done
what was said and done
was all that would last,
and I was one of the singers,
singing when the sky was the river
and the sound of the train came from within my head
and the birds sang when the earth was the forest
and the trees sang, and the grass sang.
When all was said and done
what was said and done
was all that would last,
what was said and done
was what I sang.
The birds sang, the trees sang, the grass sang.
And what was said and done
was all that would last,
yes, what was said and done
was what I sang.
That is how it was
and that is how it is.
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