forgetting

Cluttered recollection

/ Fran Haley / 14 Comments

During the March Open Write over at Ethical ELA, host Rex Muston invited participants to craft “Junk Drawer Affirmations” because, writes Rex: The most urgent motivations to fix something or do something purposeful are tied to the things often gathered there.  The eventual rummaging through the drawer lends to varied levels of reminiscence…Pick your favorite junk drawer and explore it with a search that settles on something that carries deeper meaning.

I could have chosen one of several drawers, truth be told. But this one called to me. I’d already gone to rummage in it recently, and…well, it takes writing a poem to get to deeper meanings.

Cluttered Recollection

I forgot
what brought me
to the old rolltop desk

and what I was looking for
in this drawer

it isn’t the box 
of sheet protectors
left behind by my youngest
marking his time
in high school band

not the psychedelic folders
I bought to hold
copies of songs for
kids at church to practice
the neon-swirl flower-covers 
peeking out from under
the folded map of
the British Isles
this juxtaposition
conjuring a sense
of the 1960s 
and The Beatles…
can’t buy me love, oh
no no no no…

not the bag
of unsharpened pencils
I won at a staff PD session
(why haven’t I used them?)

or the phone chargers,
wires twisting and coiling
over and around
five clear marbles
I hid here last year
to keep them away
from my toddler granddaughter

or the tag she tore off
my Princess Diana
Beanie Baby bear
(ripped away,
just like
the Princess)

or the flat little Ziploc
lying so unobtrusively
in the midst of it all
like an untold secret
carried within

—don’t know why I saved it,
this tiny snakeskin
pale as sand
fragile as a minute,
an exhaled breath

I found it
in the garage last spring
just a remnant
of a shy earth snake
that was once here
then gone
leaving only this papery bit
of itself behind

I remember putting it
in this baggie

I think I meant
to show it
to the granddaughters

but I forgot
just like I forgot
what brought me
to this old rolltop desk
that I’d given to their dad
when he was still a boy.

*******

Composed for Day 29 of the Slice of Life Story Challenge with Two Writing Teachers

Forgotten

/ Fran Haley / 10 Comments

Forgotten

Forgotten Sounds Pt.II. Marco Nurnberger. CC BY

Memory makes us. If we couldn’t recall the who, what, where, and when of our everyday lives, we wouldn’t be able to function. – “Memory Basics,” Psychology Today

This week, I remembered a poem I wrote as a teenager.

Some of the lines returned to me, complete and clear.

I couldn’t recall other lines at all.

I wrote the poem after a dream. In this dream, I was with a group of young people around my own age in a deserted beachy area with trees. We had reunited there on a hazy afternoon when the light is most golden, just as the sun begins to set, and with great joy, we began singing.

Except that I really did not know these people, this place, this song. In the dream I knew I was supposed to know all of these things, and I didn’t. I was meant to belong, to be a part, and I couldn’t. The sense of mounting sadness over the desperate attempt to remember the significance of these people and the words to the beautiful song so that I could join in was overwhelming.

The dream haunted me so that when I woke, I wrote the poem.

Remembering my poem for the first time in years, I wanted to reread it, to recapture the lines that were missing in my memory. I could envision the little stapled booklet I made, could actually recall other poems I wrote in it, word for word.

I couldn’t find it.

I searched everywhere I thought the booklet ought to be – I could not remember where I put it.

Things like this become compulsions for me. The more I searched without success, the more determined I became to find the missing poems.

At some point I realized the many layers of irony folded into this situation: I wrote a poem about forgetting something I could not remember in the first place, because I wanted to remember the experience; not remembering all the lines compelled me to read it again, and I forgot where I put it.

I began to think about what dementia patients must feel like.

But I kept looking, and yesterday, in a box of old notebooks, in a planner under some loose papers, I found it:

Forgotten Remembrance

My mind, it plays a melody

That it hasn’t ever heard

A voice sings in my memory

But remembers not a word

Faces I don’t recognize

Are singing this with me

Sadness streaming from my eyes

Such a haunting harmony

I hear the music chiming there

And then again it’s gone

Hidden in my mind somewhere

Chiming off and on

I ought to know this tune

These words I’ve sung before

I’ll try to learn them very soon

So I can sing them more

I can’t remember this refrain

I’ve forgotten it this far

My mind cries out to know this strain

And what the lyrics are

But all I know is sorrow

A deep and dark despair

I’ll cry and cry tomorrow

For what was never there.

At last. My mind can rest now.

I certainly can’t end on such a dark note, so today I pay tribute to the vital, mysterious power of memory, how it makes us who we are; to writing, which preserves who we are at various points in our lives and sets us free from whatever haunts or hurts us; and to the foresight of my young, rather gothic self for having grasped it.

 

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