Unforgettable
Were I a scientist
rather than just
a wondering guy,
I’d study what shows up
like a person in a room
when you look around
and she’s there.
Give me a maze, some electrodes
and a pen skating across a graph,
a rat with obstacles and tasks,
anything for experience,
the kind that sinks
without being missed,
like the girl who came
to school for a year,
then moved away.
I’ll comb the creature’s cortex
for evidence of where memories go
until something lights them in the mind,
or is it more like
a flat rock lifted,
exposing billions,
ready to be revived?
The End of July
EB more present in later poems. The figures walking up and down the icy
beach…we stand back from them…we see more of the human condition mimed
out for us than ever previously.
James Merrill, diary entry
We couldn’t tell
if he was digging
for a living or vacation play,
waders stained by salt
and weathered Igloo cooler.
Two kids nearby
looked nothing like him,
nor did their mother
with rolled pant legs,
so there went the grandfather hypothesis.
When my wife asked, “Any luck?”
he shook his head
with a self-deprecating laugh
and said, “But it’s fun.”
Across the tidal strait
lay Duxbury Beach proper,
the one in the Elizabeth Bishop poem with the line
On the way back, our faces froze on the other side.
A sunburned teen
had turned us away
as non-residents,
so we re-crossed the causeway
and settled for this shorter, littered,
waveless substitute,
the old guy and the family
filling in for creamy summer natives.
Instead of walking
in the poet’s vanished sandprints,
I looked down at my wife’s toes
and imagined they were hers.
Passing the clammer on the way back,
we smiled on our other side.