Vago | The Art of Remembering | The Space of a Single Breath
Vago | Back to top
She wasn’t always Garbo.
Standing behind the counter, Greta
Gustafsson sold hats, learned how to slip
pears into handbags, how to steal away
from overeager embraces in snow-
bound sleighs, on trains.
Her face on film rises
and floats—a whisper—lighter
than air. But to achieve Garbo,
Greta had to shed twenty pounds,
and sleep even less. Vago:
loveliness always within
reach, yet impossible to grasp.
Is that the secret
behind her Baltic sea-drenched
eyes, like the city sky
rinsed clean by rain, or a stream
of sunlight falling on promises
still wet with morning?
The Talmud says, To learn
about the invisible, look to the visible.
But what if the silhouetteof Garbo
scraping against the silver
screen is all we have? She fled
so quickly. What if Garbo’s
Mata Hari was right:
“Here are your eyes,”
she tells her blinded lover,
placing his fingertips on her own,
“with those ridiculously long
lashes. Here are your eyes—”
The Art of Remembering | Back to top
…Strong emotion must leave its trace—Virginia Woolf
What a lark, what a plunge, the traces emotion’s begotten:
Upright tea and pale-skinned meringues at the Café Divine.
Memory, like a proper angel, supplies what you’ve forgotten.
Mother descending the stair in a gown of Egyptian cotton,
Father hurling words like nightingales, and the bell-like dive
Of larks, as you plunge into these traces emotion’s begotten.
Alley cats dirty the tablecloth, thumbprints spoil the jam, and rotten
You’ve forgotten to polish the bibelots. Shouldn’t they shine?
Like a solicitous angel, memory supplies what you have forgotten.
Say goodbye to the tea service. Each porcelain cup, sodden
With tears, holds an eternity; the fragrance of violets quickening
The freefall, the lark’s plunge, into traces emotion’s begotten.
So you collapse into tears beneath a quilt of summer cotton,
Listening to the nickel rhythms of rain, older sister sighing on the divan.
Like an angel in the house. Memory supplies what you have forgotten:
Wishbones, and after dinner, a game of charades. Shut in
By stars and a drunken moon, dare you begin your memoirs? Enlivened
By traces, these white larks your plunging emotions have begotten,
That angel memory supplies: what you have not forgotten.
The Space of a Single Breath | Back to top
We—mother, father, and I—
sit beside the hospital bed,
amid the tulip-leaf green sofa
and glass table holding
the Hummelfiguren
my grandmother has assembled
over the years. How her
hair shines, how still she
holds the light.
The order in this sun-drenched room
overlooks a silent garden where
once she tended roses
named for empresses and queens,
and elaborately ruffled peonies.
Photographs adorn the sideboard,
each face well-dusted
by the woman who cares for her now.
The crystal vases shine,
empty and clean.
“Misha, Mishinka.”
She speaks to my father,
but the name belongs to the brother she adored.
“Misha, Mishinka.”
My father leans closer,
my mother and I follow.
We seem to breathe as one.
(But she says nothing more.)
Through her eyeglass frames, I see
flecks of dust magnified
on the lashes of each eye.
Beneath the sheer white cotton blouse
wrapped like a robe,
beneath the white cotton gloves,
the clean sheet and blankets,
she is translucent skin and bone.
Now, my father holds a plastic cup
to her lips. “Careful,”
cautions my mother,
“not too much.
She tries to swallow, chokes.
My father touches a napkin to her chin,
catching the pink juice
before it stains her blouse.
Beneath the blankets,
legs curl in towards her body,
like the morning glories
picked for me this morning.
For an hour or so, I gazed
at resplendent purple blossoms touched
with blue. Then, they curled
into themselves like spiders do
when they need to make themselves small.
As a child, I watched her slip silk stockings
up her calves
and over her knees,
pinning each in place. Once,
in the midst of a humid July, blueberry picking,
she went bare-legged.
Bending beside me
close to the damp soil,
I missed the sound of her silk stockings.
I miss it now.
Morning glories close.
Careful, she cannot swallow.
O sink, sink into sleep.
Shoulders lean in close.