Memory: a
game
Bert Haverkate-Ens
I used to play a game with cards,
I think I called it Memory.
You laid them down
so many across
so many down
the faces turned away.
Then you turned up one
and then another.
If they matched,
you were briefly happy –
you removed the pair
from the grid -
and then you turned over
two more cards
those clueless backs
but for their random location
in the universe
which was all you had to go by –
and your memory.
Perhaps this is the game I am playing with myself
when I walk to the river.
It is infinitely more complex and subtle.
I turn over a card
and then my unconscious self
does so in turn.
If that is indeed who I am playing with.
What an idea:
out of all of the matter
and all of the energy
in the known and unknown universe
there should be a cohesive collection
of matter and energy that is me?
I, who used to live with a man who
talked at length
about what he termed
the subject-object problem.
This was in the Grand Street Hotel –
that is what we called our upstairs apartment,
the apartment on the second floor
of a two-story white house
on the corner of Grand Street
and –
now I’ve forgotten the cross street.
The living room walls were pale green,
I think, and the bottoms of the windows
came about to our knees.
I remember the time –
it was a party –
and he was picking up empties.
At a certain point he cradled in is arms
about as many as he could hold,
and when he reached down
to pick up another bottle,
one fell from the collection in his grasp.
This went on with a haphazardness
and a gracefulness
that seemed accidental for a time
and then contrived.
But no one –
not even he –
seemed to know when he had slipped from one mode
to the other.
And so the sky is reflected in the water,
and for an instant I see in my memory
a time millions of years ago
when that pattern had been turned up before
and I am happy
and I set these two cards aside.
There are patterns that we recognize,
after all.
I am the subject,
the objects like grains of sand on the bar -
the river will rise and flip them
all face down
again when the rains come.
It is not clear to me that this is the problem
he spoke of all those years ago.
It seems that I have walked this way before,
and of course I have,
but I mean something else …
how far back does memory go?
and another bottle tumbled to the floor,
the carpeting hideous –
but soft.
And we laughed.
And we
laughed.
And
we laughed.
After a long pause,
I stepped onto the Kaw River Bridge
and the sky was reflected in the river,
and I wept.
I play a game I call Memory.
I keep picking up the empties,
the faces turned toward the earth.
I am mostly clueless,
but I think, maybe,
I’ve seen the sun before,
reflecting on a river,
on a planet, the third one out
from that star
they say is but one
of billions.
I can remember the location
but I’ve forgotten what.
Yet for an instant
my arms are full
and I bend to pick up
another bottle.
And the river rises.
in the place I thought it would be.
And we lived for a moment
in the Grand Street Hotel.
Fragmented
Associations
Bert Haverkate-Ens
One word follows another like ducklings and chickens scatter
when feed is cast the iron if struck rings the bull bellows in the barnyards of
neighing horses and inching worms their winding way to candled yolks without
stormy flame or plenty of ice will flow or bloom but never amount to a steel
hoe our lot of anything finished.
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