A Memoir

          for Miriam Levine

I’d like to write memoiristically, but my interest in myself

keeps getting in the way. Not to mention my foggy

memory. The miracle is you could describe your bedroom

at the corner of State Street. The low ceiling. The large

windows with their clear glass. And suddenly a place

rubs into focus, brighter than anything real,

and more lasting. Why brighter? Because in the present

we could be distracted by the camouflage pattern

of daily worry, gnawing at us like a hunger,

but in memory everything is bright and thought-about

like a painting with a frame that protects it

the way a wall protects a city. The city

of the past. I could write: My mother

never shopped. Except to sit down at her narrow desk

and call the grocer, then the butcher, every morning

with her musical voice, as though she had to charm them

into delivering. This is a sentence of memoir

and I am visible in every word of it, the overtone

of condemnation in the first, short declarative remark

and the jealousy of the final simile. My heart

is with the boy standing beside her, waiting for attention.

Oh, if I could only step outside, she could live again

and so could I. Forever, perhaps. That self-forgetfulness,

that turning oneself into a lens. That generous devotion.

I was the life my mother was planning to have

in her next life, I must have convinced myself.

And when I get into arguments, I find myself shouting

the way my grandfather would have. Shouting

at board meetings was his amusement, rather than golf.

Is that memoiristic? No, that shows my insane conviction

that the family dead return to life in me.