Laure Anne Bosselaar USA
MEMORY MALL
Funneled into, tunnelled
toward the past’s underground:
lives, loves — millennia of them.
Cemeteries, mass graves, urns.
Photo albums, memorials, memoirs:
all clogged with indispensable souls.
If that’s too abstract, think
your first love, your neighbor’s dog,
the stone carver’s son, Rainer Maria Rilke —
all equally fated, standing in line for,
or already crowding, memory’s mall.
I long for that promiscuity: dead gods,
scholars, cops and whores equally
longing for remembrance, selling
their tricks to nothing but bones and dust.
I’ve prayed for death, ardently.
And ardently pray
to be forgiven each plea, fearing the black
draft might pull the ones I love
into that vortex too —
a siren song we try to sing louder than —
but our tune nothing more
than cinders turning to stone: a rock
no memory, love or god can ever roll back.
© Copyright, 2015,
Laure Anne Bosselaar. |