One day it will vanish,how you felt when you were overwhelmedby her, soaping each other in the showe
One day it will vanish,how you felt when you were overwhelmedby her, soaping each other in the shower,or when you heard the newsof his death, there in the T-Bone dineron Queens Boulevard amid the shoutsof short-order cooks, Armenian, oblivious.One day one thing and then a dear otherwill blur and though they won’t be lostthey won’t mean as much,that motorcycle ride on the dirt roadto the deserted beach near Cadiz,the Guardia mistaking you for a drug-runner,his machine gun in your belly—already history now, merely your history,which means everything to you.You strain to bring backyour mother’s face and full bodybefore her illness, the arc and tenorof family dinners, the mysteriesof radio, and Charlie Collins,eight years old, inviting youto his house to see the largest turdthat had ever come from him, unflushed.One day there’ll be almost nothingexcept what you’ve written down,then only what you’ve written down well,then little of that.The march on Washington in ’68where you hoped to change the worldand meet beautiful, sensitive womenis choreography now, cops on horses,everyone backing off, stepping forward.The exam you stole and put back unseenhas become one of your stories,overtold, tainted with charm.All of it, anyway, will go the way of icebergscome summer, the small chunks floatingin the Adriatic until they’re only water,pure, and someone taking sad pridethat he can swim in it, numbly.For you, though, loss, almost painless,that Senior Prom at the Latin Quarter—Count Basie and Sarah Vaughan, and youjust interested in your date’s cleavageand staying out all night at Jones Beach,the small dune fires fueled by driftwood.You can’t remember a riff or a song,and your date’s a woman now, married,has had sex as you havesome few thousand times, good sexand forgettable sex, even boring sex,oh you never could have imaginedback then with the waves crashingwhat the body could erase.It’s vanishing as you speak, the soul-grit,the story-fodder,everything you retrieve is your past,everything you let gogoes to memory’s out-box, open on all sides,in cahoots with thin air.The jobs you didn’t get vanish like scabs.Her good-bye, causing the phone to slipfrom your hand, doesn’t hurt anymore,too much doesn’t hurt anymore,not even that hint of your father, ghost-thumpingon your roof in Spain, hurts anymore.You understand and therefore hatebecause you hate the passivity of understandingthat your worst rage and finestprivate gesture will flatten and collapseinto history, become invisiblelike defeats inside houses. Then something happens(it is happening) which won’t vanish fast enough,your voice fails, chokes to silence;hurt (how could you have forgotten?) hurts.Every other truth in the world, out of respect,slides over, makes room for its superior.—Stephen Dunn, The Vanishings -- source link
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