The Tree of Forgetting
When I woke from that dream
I thought of you once again,
Because I forgot to forget you.
—Fernán Silva Valdés, “Cancion al arbol del olvido”
If death were a still thing, it would be
a tree like this, its winter arms caught
in the gesture of frenzy, like a widow
who tears apart her funeral garment
to wear the look of the heart’s refusals.
Me, I wear black. As does my family.
The color of forgetting is the color
of respect, of memory and the night ahead.
I wear something just formal enough
to honor those I knew and do not know.
I usher the weak among us through the door.
If death were a tree, it would be the lung
of a man when it goes still a moment.
Listen, he says. It’s out there, the pulse
he alone can hear, the heartbeat inside
the pillow he warms, in gratitude, in dread.
~
Tonight I keep listening to Ginastera,
a deep blue poem set deeper into song.
The Tree of Forgetting. Tonight
I see him lean into his baby grand,
as the world leans closer to disaster.
1938. Take a walk in your sleep,
and you just might find your way there,
listening for the part of you that listens,
for the stone that fades into the well.
If there is an answer at the bottom,
a mushroom splash, a cloud, I forget.
If there’s a song down there, I am waiting.
~
When I was a child, I saw the horror
of my age in movies and hid—we all did—
under desks. Drop, said the teacher.
I loved the element of surprise. Drop,
and we gripped our necks, disappeared
into the dark enclosures of ourselves.
Back then it seemed a desk would save us.
Or barring that, a tree. Oblivion.
Chances are it comes from the word
levis, meaning made smooth. Like a pool
that gathers into focus as it stills.
Music recalls a past we never lived.
It re-verses. Like a desperate measure
that strives to end the suffering it causes.
It comforts, it forgets, it forgets to forget.
~
I wish I could remember when it helps
to remember, forget when I am free
to forget. A dream understands
the horrors of too much and too little.
Loss is indelible. And then it’s not.
And then it is music. Remember
the day oblivion fell from the sky.
Back then the flash of the explosion
outlined the bodies in a gray chalk.
I imagine it was difficult to tell just
what they were sometimes, let alone
who. I imagine the trees were x-rays
of themselves. Death, the ordinary,
makes all things strange. Brittle as ash.
Every bone a branch, cloaked in winter.
~
To try to forget is the dream’s reason
to remember. Try to imagine a night
without reasons to leave a day behind.
I have a good friend I keep forgetting,
the way memory must. Like love. It selects.
Like us. It burns. It keeps us company.
Perhaps Ginastera understood
the roots of the tree of forgetting
are those of music. We sing to remember
and forget, to be, in song, two people.
If stillness could be musical, it would
be a tree like this. It would be
the form of remembrance. Truth is,
music is no argument, though those
in need of reasons walk the path of it,
the way a singer walks into her music,
in which, to hear it, she must be silent.
~
Sometimes I play Ginastera’s Tree
over and over, as if the next rendition
takes me closer to what I love about it.
In time I turn away of course. I turn
to some other tune, waiting to forget.
The tree of forgetting has no century.
It tells no story. It is no mushroom cloud.
It is a place I go to, night after night,
where what returns lies beyond my choosing.
I do not choose to love. Take me with you,
I ask the tree, I want to return as rain
in the crackle of skillets, spit in the fire,
forgiveness in the silence at my feet.
Take me, I ask the song inside the song,
I will be quiet. You have my promise.
Take my silence into the grove at midnight,
as if, in your leaving, you take me back. 