Memory in the Wake of the World’s Fracturing

/ gregorystackpole

Fault not Mnemosyne for being unreliable;

since the fissure opened she has been wandering on the outside

blind and blindfolded; tiles from her mosaic body flake off, until she

is only searching fingertips and striding thighs;

occasionally an angel of the Lord will come,

gather and re-attach many lost stones,

and gently redirect her, pointing — but she cannot

see, so she meanders again as soon as his hands leave her shoulders on his departing

to some other emergency within the meanwhile;

thus she stumbles, approaches the threshold to the interior

–when some square of azure breaks free

and you remember something as though

it were sent, but it wasn’t, it’s merely that, on her own, she’s just

forever disassembling and lost, here, in the aftermath.

19 thoughts on “Memory in the Wake of the World’s Fracturing”

    • So glad you enjoyed it, Carla. The azure is the color of the heavens, and often a memory can feel sent, as though it were part of our fate, some recall of some unattended and important thing, but really such are often just blips in the blinded life of Memory, who wanders aimlessly when she’s not steered. The brokenness of the world often sends up things like that — where the tectonic plates of things stir up something that feels important because it is an eruption, interruption, disruption — when, in truth, the important things are usually quiet, such as the moving of said plates — if even that. The whole is damnable in its finitude, but lovely nonetheless, and worthy of our care — even wayward Memory.

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  4. Issues of memory are fascinating! The ways that it mutates, evolves, is both reliable and unreliable, and our control and/or lack of control over it. The sadness of it and its joys. Not quite sure how one steers memory? Selecting what should be remembered? What should not be? Interesting to ponder.

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  5. Pingback: Poetry, Power, and the Arrest of Thought (Part One) | Into the Clarities

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