You tell me your memory is a room stacked with newspaper.
Sometimes you enter, swipe dust off the stacks, turn the brown pages.
Some you never looked at. You left us those and they are silent.
Is this organic? this gesture of one hand, this surrender? the way your surgeon says one brain hemisphere disconnects from the other? Is this the gesture of fireweed and wild rose, horsetail and lupine, stinging nettle? To lie down at last? Say, nothing comes between us now? Or is this the moment when rain begins?
Wind begins, a sound like someone moving a heavy armoire, or the oak chest of drawers in my childhood room, with the warped oval mirror and aluminum sheen. Birch limbs flail like scissors, crossing land, a flock of brown birds in the sodden field. I would show you pictures of this bay, now overlain with peach and pale blue light, jagged between clouds and mountains. I would show you — Here is Tuesday. And here is Friday, noon. This is your daughter, Eva. And this. And this. Rain drums the roof at night, like your fingers, and the wind — a moan, a chant, a hum, a brushing shoulder, indifferent to me. I like to listen to the rain, Mama, on my red tin roof. When it drums harder, I’m relieved. It’s a release, a long exhalation holding my breath. Or the way it stops, as if it never was at all, as if it had always been this silent.
