To know for certain
To know for certain
a memory resumed
reenters the lottery
remove, rewrite,
re-member,
seeps into your nose,
fingers — bread where there’s
family, the fact of a mushroom.
Recall the sour of leavening while
scanning at the library.
What power for this new relief.
This mind’s new screen.
On a walk, an errant turtle strafes
straight in the maw of a box, ok
it was a raised bed, ok
in its heyday it was raised,
giving names an origin like
two myths separated
by a shallow but blabbering stream.
I’m less comfortable reading my own poems aloud - it’s like the “musician’s singing voice drives themselves crazy” but at a new level. Gave it a go here though.
What does it mean to know something? I’m finding a great deal of peace in the unknown, lately. Less in a “I don’t know what to do tonight” kind of way, and more in a “we, as a species, may not know very much after all,” kind of way.
A line from the anthropologist Anna Tsing has been rattling in my head this week “Every event in human history has been a more-than-human event.” She most recently worked on this sobering, bewildering resource on the levers of extraction.
In this marvelous conversation, host David Naimon and author Melanie Rae Thon discuss the notion of how each time one visits a memory it becomes vulnerable to changing and being re-formed. I find that beautiful, but I also don’t think I have a nostalgic bone in my body. If you knew a memory would change would you summon it or would you let it sit? (Almost sounds like an Eminem song… oops.)
Names continue to be interesting to me. I saw a turtle on a walk this week and it did head into a strange raised bed/ box hybrid. I think it was a box turtle before, but now it definitely is.
Thanks for reading. Please like the post if you liked the poem, it helps :)