My memory is just awful
What I ate for lunch -
What was her name?
When did that happen?
Where?
How does that story end, begin
and was it real?
Or was it just in my dreams?
Sometimes I remember something as truth when in fact it never happened or was yet to happen, like Fritz dying and Elizabeth Taylor too.
When she actually passed away, I'd already mourned her, but Fritz, apparently I'd not really let go of him enough and so I cried all over again when he departed for real, long after he died in my realistic dream.
Fritz my uncle's dog, who lived with us in France;
such a sweetheart, such a good pet and such a traitor. I'd find him out on the streets of our town, having taken himself for a walk, lying motionless as if he'd been shot, but only just sunning himself in front of the butcher's shop.
Me on my way to the post office where they'd run out of stamps to sell me and him lying there, pretending not to know me, the foolish American girl who shaved her legs and underarms...
My awful memory is not one bit awful, but is in fact powerful, vivid, burnt like a brand on my brain when I recall certain times, some distant and some just recent, where I'm moving over the earth, walking, touched by the sun, brushed by the breeze, like on the fields of tall, beige, living, breathing, bending stalks of gold surrounding the volcano I visited with my children last week.
So alive was the earth -
exhaling through steam vents, puffing out blue-grey smoke toward the golden sun, which melded the steam orange and black, till they met with the silver clouds above and became one, alive more...
And then a month or so before, when I walked beside my friend and the dogs ran ahead of us, searching the soft, giving, bed-like fields, with the blond blades all parted and lying down, breaking beneath our feet as we followed and waited for them to point out the treasures, the colorful birds.
And in my memory, those fields, the volcano and the hunting ground, are not what they might appear to be outside my mind.
They are not violent, they are not all together wild -
they're peaceful, heavily scented; fresh, musky...
The strands hold you
The sun pushes you down
Your own breath wakes you, prompting you to resist everything else, which lulls your mind,
slows your heart and sends you into a living dream, which you cannot forget and wouldn't want to.
In fields of my youth, all laughter and motion, my body ran through the stalks, like a lover's hand runs through hair
all breath and memory.
Walking like that, it's where I make the only promises I keep.
My internal resolutions
Things that you don't know you want, but you do.
You want them
and you wake up to it
in the fields, with the sun and the airs
your breath and the breeze, which become one.
And the people beside you
your children
the hunter
even just yourself
are all you need
and you make a promise
and the promise becomes your memory
and you won't forget
when you walk in fields of gold
you'll remember me when the west wind moves
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