I bottle memories. I have a little jar of sand that has slipped through my fingers and into the nooks and crannies of pockets and bags. This grain of dust, that speck of sand, a crushed shell, an ice-cream wrapper folded up tightly into a small wad and shoved deep into an unused fold of my wallet, a scrap of torn paper with a fragment of a name scratched onto it in a spidery childish hand. All these treasures are long consigned to the trash. I have had to haul my life on my back. There is no room for these little aide memoirs, these pagan fetishes that cursed me, these small stitches that kept me tied to life by strings. I was a puppet for my emotions, I hung on lines, strung up on love, and led by the leash of devotion.
I was never suited to the suburban life that has attics and basements and cupboards that no one goes into until someone dies and a living soul has a fancy to find that padded card they were sent by someone who seemed permanent when they were there, but proved transitory in the end of things, which was the end for them, but somehow everyone else keeps truckin’ on without them. I need things for living, not for remembering. Every time I look into the past it seems like another fragment of it perishes in the tomb of memory. I have laid roses on the tombs, dusty relics from love a hundred years or more gone away.
I steal them in the dead of night from crypts where no one loves any more. Tombs with hands that were blessed every night before supper by families that loved those hands and the eyes that looked upon them, tombs with souls who poured the last of the milk into their husband’s coffee, and the last of the coffee into their son’s empty cup before he rode out to meet his fate on the road to somewhere . . . else. Might as well have been Damascus for all the returning he did! These are the last tokens of appreciation, that sweet cousin of love. These are the last two pennies in the widow’s purse, put upon the eyes of her lover, while her husband swung upon the gallows or went to the guillotine, leaving her with the secret that she was neither glad for it nor sad for it either.
Oh love upon love! Oh loss after loss! Not the bread, nor the butter! Not the rose, nor the thorn! Not the father . . . nor the son. These are the tokens of hope, that one day we will meet again. These are phones buried with the daughters, and letters of sorrow and regret buried with the mothers, whose words burn in their hands, skeletal as now they are but that once knitted together life for the child they love who then betrayed them to the very ends of their world. To the ends of their world and to the borders of the next!
I sneak into these places of sacrifice and adoration, these last vestiges of hope beyond hope that something might remain of love. My bones rest beneath a starry hill. The mound upon them misses its hearts and forgets its manners. In winter it sits beneath a shroud of frost, a vague half-hearted sprinkling of snow: everything is dead above and below. In spring cruel shoots peek out here and there in the graveyard around where my earthly remnants rest in rust and dust and forgetting, but they do not burst into life around me. I wonder if I can make move that crumbling pile of bones, that funerary mass of fleshless dust and dirt.
I try and reinhabit my body, see if I can jingle or jangle, if I can twitch a arm, or hoist a leg or snap fingers in time to the drip drip drip that comes in through the decayed roof of the crypt. Drip. Drip drip. There is no afterlife to be found in the tomb, just memories of bodies that once birthed love and held devotion in their hands, whose chest moved up and down and up again like those painted ponies on the Carousel at Coney Island pleasure pier. They will not move again, not any time soon. The dead will rise? The dead already rise, just not in their bones, every time a bird tweaks a branch into a gap in the nest of the Angels. Oh memory! Oh love! Oh loss! Oh forgetfulness!
Nothing moves within the grave. There is no time for such infantile games of phony reanimation. This here is dead men’s country. This is not the pale death of reputation, this not White Feather City, not yellow-belly time. This is not Boot Hill, nor Goat Hollow. This is the grave; a private place, even if within we do embrace the tattered ribbons of memory, and lay our see-through hands on our mother’s cheek and wonder if she walks somewhere . . . else or if she rests in feathery arms. Those arms were not made for me. My wings are made of leather. My soul is a hide cup full of gall, it is a bitter draught, a sour shot. It turns to ashes in my mouth. “You can spit all you want to, Boy,” but it ain’t gonna change Fate none!” That is what Rainbow Joe said to me when he found me scratching my toe in the dirt like a chicken waiting for feed and finding nothing but want and need in the dust, not even a bug or a stray root. Anything that could be savored was devoured by time and desperation long since gone.
A man cannot live on dead flowers alone. No man can survive on mouthfuls of petals and graveyard fragments. Memory cannot be fueled by love gone on too long down the line. We wear the names, we hold the stories. We might even carry the burden deep within the caverns and cabinets of our souls, but the love that has gone before is not ours to own. That jar of mustard with the red and white checkered cloth secured by a piece of string, the last of the bundle of string that I purchased before I left for hotter climates and more lucrative adventures, it went untouched. It went untouched and stayed in the larder for years because my hands ground the seeds, and my reckoning measured out the vinegar and the salt, and added the savory and the herbs I gathered from the bushes I saw on my last walk through my old childhood haunting places, those trails of my adolescence.
I mixed up the mustard good and hot and with my secret ingredient which was just horseradish after all, and I left it with a note that said, “I love you, Mama. I will return rich and fat and with pomade in my hair and diamonds on the soles of my boots!” Instead I was nothing but bones and disease as I pulled into the harbor. I was a ruined Charlemagne! I was not even fit for guillotine nor military service, the latter being much the same as the former, or at least having the same result, only with more suffering in the in between. I had money, but not enough. I had respect, but what did it matter?
I had wiped away indiscretion not with glory but with pitiable frailty and the kind of look that a dog gives when it knows the end is near. That look that both begs for mercy and hopes none will be received. What use is mustard and secret recipes when all that is needed is good old lead. The fragments in my hand that burned with shame every time the weather got too hot and inflamed my mind. The lead I was promised in a musket to fight for a country that sought to disown me? The lead inside the draughts I took to try and poison the sickness within me? The lead of the casket I was laid in? In the end it was all base metal, all heavy metal, all poison and lead piping, and there was not nearly enough gold in the mix.
Oh to be gone into the lands of alchemy. I knew what I was after: that which can transform and beckons to hungry young men who grow old too soon, who grow old far too soon and pass away into the dust and dirt and loam of the potter’s ground. Perhaps roses don’t taste so bad after all. Memories are sticky as dates. Their sweetness is unsurpassed, yet in time somehow they turn to nothing but diamonds in the pressure cooker of time and fall away to be buried underground for diggers and miners to harvest once again, so they may adorn the fingers and delicate necks of the rich, bought and sold, traded as meaningless tokens, or if they get lucky, get lost in the gutters and the fields once again.
