Art: “lines hold the memories” by Silvia Pelissero
Bye. It’s been fun. What??
I’m glad we’re back.
Read your note this morning, I cried with laughter.
Did you read, is there anything more intimate than being truly seen?
Did you read, being held so tight you die?
Did you read about fuzzy trace theory?
I highly recommend that quote, you know, chains of verse I’ve seen.
Maybe once.
What about the computer metaphor, loss of entropy?
When was “maybe once?” At what time? What place?
No linguistic wishes or fears, how about that?
I freeze at the word “theory.”
You’ll do as I tell you.
Writing was what caught me out.
Memory development affects development of reasoning. That’s why there’s chaos.
You know I need a narrative line.
A book, rather. Be sorry for her. And him.
You’re the kind of ass who thinks a shell contains all of the sea its nostalgia, its index
Maybe once, we could’ve been.
Cognitive neuroscience of forgetting, errors, studies of retrieval mechanisms in recall.
Testify, sister
Did you read that thing about the god Theuth, astrology, dice etc. maker of letters?
Sea, sand, color, bodies as condition of inner self. I don’t buy it.
Say what you mean.
If two people were together, they’d tighten each other’s armbands.
Two people apart, they live by a few co-incident twists.
Circumstance, telepathy.
Each get the same fuzzy report all wrong.
Omission is forgetting, commission is different. A word for imaginary.
Pressure on the wound, wind then close.
The then-King of Egypt said no not letters, they’ll create forgetfulness.
Nature? The recorded sensual is dead, a construct.
People will trust the written characters.
Unless you’re in the fifth circle of hell, later on.
Did you read about the man who was saved? I sent you it.
Just the semblance of wisdom.
Because he thrust the other person away before himself.
Show me.
As the other car swerved towards them.
Show me the toys of your whole life, I know they’re there.
Not forgetting that helped his amputation
Say what you mean.
You have far too much beauty in place I reckon
Clarice Lispector’s egg-day in the present of the instant.
Like swimming?
That fire report really got me. Did you read it? I sent.
You have far too much.
What if you were ghosting it all?
The figures burning, rising again, asking god why, when I am so elite, so young.
A moveable type
I don’t think he retold wrongly. The moment was as it stood.
Attentuation
No it’s machines that create my melancholy
Always hidden your nods
NO it’s machines that create my melancholy. I don’t exist otherwise.
A dancer’s body with ageing movements is like analog decay
More like a ‘was.’
Second time round you, two.
I take what suits me from Freud’s ‘screen memory’ theory. I don’t care if it’s wrong.
Losing accuracy, muscle.
Close like life, I’ve just remembered the tree outside, its blossom.
We’ve the cocktail party problem, backdrop or interference. Other people.
Say what you mean.
I figure it payback for his sexism
Does you have a cat?
And for making critics say that Erika from La Pianiste is his wet dream.
What form, where did you occur? What were you?
He says that screen memory is that which replaces an associated or repressed memory.
It’s just that you always.
You know Der Sandmann? The story gives us three letters. Fire eyes. Frigid limbs.
Did you see the flock of pigeons? Hovering on the deserted El. track in Philadelphia.
Maybe once. We should or could have.
You’re a weakened slight return do I exorcise or forget?
My screen is its own form a co-haunt.
The Sandman installation is a garden at two points in history. Echoed but different.
The transit line was the birds’ food source, they waited.
Please go and look at my plants.
They remembered the system.
Eventually I will forget.
Flitting from one station to the next, growing more hungry.
Why are you paralyzed in your life. Theory?
No, too much motion.
They flew away but left that ingrain in the sky, their mass mourning attentive.
I was somewhere to hang your coat, I was the form.
Lives, routine, promise, spirit attachment.
You’ve got one hour until I fall asleep.
Sustained in mid-air by what happened.
Once. But not now.
I bite my lower lip is that another form? The wound left?
The total is only achieved via many viewpoints. Oh, I’ll say.
With other men? In other towns?
You know when I came, we’d change from nothing to one.
I created my own frame to tell our story. In motion.
Just as the earth is the medium in which ancient cities lie buried.
Say what you mean.
Nothing much happens in the frame I created, it doesn’t spool, it’s inventory. But
somehow it encapsulates a future of never-coming-back, a pixilated figure, the arms
reaching into a darkness not to envelop but to be so.
Did you read The Garden of Eden?
Do you feel a bit nomadic?
You know I don’t need a narrative line. Recorded sensual is dead again.
It is undoubtedly useful to plan excavations methodically.
In the sober rooms of our later insights.
I would always always like
Like marked-up pages
To be in touch.
Trying to find someone, their silence.
It’s just that you always have fur on your clothes.
Once an illusion is dispelled never after add a script. More chaos.
Return again to the same matter. Be afraid.
I will take myself to bed and punch me in the stomach.
I outline your body’s silhouette, it gets older.
I will take myself to bed and climb the walls.
Older, I want it such beauty. What letter, its name.
How about a paragraph about an elemental plant, one that accompanies desire.
Please go.
Rediscover your hands after 60 years.
Archives hide those who tell
A mimic keying out of what could
Have been real.
Did you see that film called Inconsolable Memories?
I think bitter humor is the way to go here, right?
The arc of Cuba’s history. Urban/rural/haunting.
It has two reels, one of 30 segments, one of 18
The longer is cut with subtitles: A FAMILIAR, A TROPICAL
Go, indolent, home, no, really, go.
A FORGOTTEN, AN ENDLESS ANOTHER
Make a fucking home.
The shorter is, too: SITUATION, ADVENTURE, PROBLEM.
The film lets us miss everything, it’s all combinatory. Inner, outer.
After 60 years of cognitive loneliness.
Inevitable stalling, bits of audio, video.
Everyone else had hands.
We are also strays in the world. We have our isolate screens.
Hemingway’s house is in there. Idiot.
Only us, we. One to.
Please go water my plants.
And then sleep.
I’ve rediscovered all of this in forgetting it.
Here’s the whole letter.
Bleed to release, I didn’t know it then. Had to bleed to release. No pressure.
Say what you MEAN.
Words migrate from scene to scene. They carry their previous incarnations.
At the close, it’s alright to say, I would have run away with you.
And then stay as words. Recitation is better than pain.
You should sleep and cut the loss of words.
Did you read that poem?
I’ll cut you. Didn’t I.
At night
Cut me out.
Of loss.
While one person predicts continuously the other person’s future behavior, the other
person recounts/forgets the other’s past behavior. And that’s interchangeable.
There you go. Let it stay.
There you go. Break it down.
Say what you mean and how I miss you
I mean, it’s a collaboration.
But I could never get a plan of you in hand.
There was never a form.
This is the same
Conversation we’ve been having for years.
Jane Lewty is the author of Bravura Cool (1913 Press: 2013) chosen by Fanny Howe as the winner of the 1913 First Book Prize in 2011. Recent poems have appeared in Bone Bouquet, TYPO and Tarpaulin Sky.