There are a million ways to remember Each one goes to war with forgetting How does the slow fading begin of the music you sang Forte Dolce Anthems of your life Each decade had its own When I remember I raise my fist Defiant In the face of fear of losing Knuckles dressed for battle A memory A shadow-dance The ones you made with your life The ones you made with your body Each season had its own I watched every move, every step, each glance And sigh My sigh echoes yours You gave me more of you than I remember Some days I am you here
Mystery stared back from those deep set eyes The ones that would soon know How difficult it can be to remember
There are a million ways to remember Today I swear I’m remembering each sacred part of you Every season has its season Mine is one of remembering
Can be read Stand with me In the shadows In the light Perhaps we’ve forgotten how to be an open book I wouldn’t speak for you Because I can’t
Once when I was young I fingered the rivers on my mother’s skin, stretched taut Followed the blue pathways on a thirty something’s hand Felt her age pulsing in her coursing veins I read age like the blind read a page My eyes partnered with my child-hands Teamed up to untangle her mysteries Heard her body tell the story of a half-life Plus some
As we sat on a pew that was ours for an hour on Sunday Nine/tenth’s of the law And all
In the pews of Methodism, souls lined up to hear Truth be told I could not hear hers Buried deep within her soul
Mink eyes on the face of a fashionable wrap Thrown over the shoulders of a worshipper Stared back at me Two pews up and to the left I thought of his sacrifice for status and beauty (The things of nightmares when you are ten) And I think of that still Her sacrifices too Draped in death
I found the mink eyes Meet my hazel eyes Frozen Motionless Dipped in death I looked elsewhere and then I looked back
Lips were red Injection-less Skin was powdered and rouged Nineteen sixty something And hairspray lingered in the air
Life lines Seek a safe place to preach the stories they have lived
Stand still at the lectern of life
And speak Face the music
Face it I cannot speak for you
Once, when I was young The stories could be read
By looking there Buried deep within the soul Clues lined up, from chin, to cheek to brow To help untangle The mystery of life lived Well I cannot speak for you
I long to read you as a book
Open To tell the stories that should be read In the lines on a face
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remember what hasn’t been
yet. Before. Today
remember what the dreams hinted to
in a happy, haunting nocturnal sort of way
of what might come to be
on some other summer’s day
things hope and longing used to say
in breathy whispers
along the lines of could, perhaps and maybe
moments that haven’t had their chance
to live to see today
remember what hasn’t been
unravel next time. Reweave memories from yesterday
remember Wednesday on a Tuesday
and all the things that wait
that ask to be remembered
like healing, birth and death
and poems that take a year to gather line by line
on the poet’s winsome breath
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elizabeth w. marshall 