This from "What Love Comes To, New & Selected Poems," by Ruth Stone.
That Day
Since then we've gone around the sun fifty times.
The sun itself has rushed on.
All the cells of my skin that you loved to touch
have flaked away and been renewed.
I am an epidermal stranger.
Even enormous factories. So much.
Even the railway station--
ball-wracked. Eliminated.
Now the dead may be pelletized,
disgorged as wafers in space.
Some may be sent to the sun in casks,
as if to Osiris.
Where is that day in Chicago
when we stood on a cement platform,
and I held your hand against my face,
waiting for a train in the warm light?
That given moment-by-moment light,
which, in a matter of hours from then,
had already traveled out of the solar system.
Sunday, July 08, 2012
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5 comments:
We age, grow older, our physical bodies break down, disintegrate. Everything breaks down.
Love, in a moment, is here and gone. Remember that day it was here and gone?
I left you and love and life at the station that day, and I have been looking for you every since.
Or, perhaps in this case, it may also be a reference to the powerful persistence of sense memory, which can be re-triggered full-blown in an instant from a scent, a touch, the sudden look of the light, a sound -- ker-blam, in an instant it's time-travel past the organized, intellectualized memory of an incident, place, time, and straight into the deepest heart of our irrational, unintellectualized emotional, physical sense memories. It's quite a trick of the body/brain. And amazing when it happens. All very, "Woa. . . ."
Very nice and kind of icky poem! Disturbing food (pardon the pun) for thought. Imagined a carpet full of dust mites munching shed skin. Too much Nova or sci-fi - what was that movie where shed skin cells would give away that you had been someplace or who you were?
Yes, indeed. We're all like Peanut's "Pigpen," shedding little bits of us as we move along. Bloodhounds can "read" our scent molecules and bits of pieces of us like a bright line, following us through the swamps of Georgia with ease. On the good side, gazillions of these little microbes that infest us are our friends, going to battle evil bugs that would harm us. And they're now finding out that if you have babies, get a dog or cat and send the kid outside into the dirt. Makes his/her immune system more effective and reduces allergies and asthma attacks, etc. Mites is yer friend! From dust we came; we are of the earth, clothed in a skin of dust and critters, a sort of mobile living earth, and when we die, we return to the living earth and become part of Her skin once more. So revel in the Eeeuuuuu, fellow Mobile Mud Pile!
Hilarious Ann, hadn't thought of Pigpen in years! And what you say is all so true!! We must embrace "eeeeuuuuuu!"
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