Nothere Again

Geof Huth, "Nothere" (refound on 13 May 2011)
We are haunted. And every ghost is of our own creation. The past rises up to greet us when we expect something new. We cannot escape it. The things we did we do again, over and over, and we wonder why we cannot become better people, or become better at it. And "it" changes with the day. We recirculate everything. Every one of us has only a certain number of stories to tell, so we tell them over and over. The details might change, but our situation (trapped with just these meager scraps of the past) does not. I can tell you, again, the story of being in the mountains around Calacoto, Bolivia, and lowering all five of my siblings into a cave I did not know the exit to. It is a good story, even with so many details lost, but it is just one story, not more evidence of my life. It comes back to me because it tells me about myself. I take risks with others. I take risks with myself. I lowered myself into the cave last and pulled the rope down with me afterwards. My mother banned us from the mountains after that, especially me, but I could not stay out of them. I could have slipped off a little skirt of the mountains and fallen hundreds of feet to my crippled death dozens of times, but I never did. While blind caving (meaning without flashlights), I could have crawled my way off a ledge to my death, but the light always came just in time and I could see the danger. These stories return. I tell them in a certain order. I remember rolling boulders off a cliff in Bolivia so that they would bounce, maybe ten feet high, off the ground a hundred feet below. I was of the mountains. It never leaves me. Nothing does. Cut off an arm, and we still have a memory of that arm, we still feel that arm, and even dream of it. This morning, just before waking, I went through a dream carrying a small girl, and she said something about my baldness, and I said she had plenty of hair, plenty of brunette hair like that of my daughter Erin, age 26, because that toddler was my daughter. I was remembering the talkative, intelligent, beautiful girl she was. And she hasn't changed. So, when I found a poem of mine, a temporary poem, four days ago, on the window of my bathroom, I recalled that nothing never leaves us. Even memories long forgotten sometimes returne. There are events in my life that I willed out of my memory for decades, only to be shocked by their return, to be shocked by my life. So this poem, a little pun (the highest form of literature), is a poem about being in place but not being in place, a poem about the instability of our desires and actions and bodies in motion through porous space. It is such an obvious poem: "Nothere." Meaning both "not here" and "no there," meaning, in the end, "nowhere," because there is nowhere to be. Except maybe everywhere. This poem on 13 May 2011 is a remnant of a steamglyph, a poem written into the steam of a certain window of our bathroom, the window that looks west towards my place of birth, thousands of miles away. I wrote the poem at the spur of the moment, because I had found a writing surface thick with condensation. I wrote the poem on the window, so I wrote it to overlay the old carriage house in the backyard, our three-car garage, what I sometimes call the back house, a building made of bluestone on all four sides, something of a leaky wonder, a place where I once lived, a part of our house, an extension of our lives as members of a family, a wordy, often noisy, obstreperous family. And after I wrote the poem, with my finger in the steam, I took a photograph, and then the poem disappeared, for months. I'd forgotten about it, just as I've forgotten the fact and fashion of so many poems I've written into the sand, the dirt, frost gathered on windows, steam on same, the snow. I write in these surfaces to make a poem of the moment that might last only a moment (especially with sandglyphs). These poems are meant to fade, to sink, to disappear back into the earth, into the recesses of memory. Some of them only I, of everyone who has ever lived, has ever seen them in fact rather than photograph. So for one to rise from the dead is a shock of sorts, small, but sudden, and sharp. I can see in its outlines the trace of my fingerprints, the evidence of dirt, the word as smudge. And I see a sense of continuity, how a thing extends into the future not because it exists, but because it is remembered. I write this while sipping Clear Creek pear brandy, which is vaguely sweet but intense, which carries with it the taste of a pear so ripe that a bite into it would release the sweet and liquid juice of that pear down over one's chin. This brandy, not quite an eau de vie, but almost that methodical water of life, is a memory, not of a pear, but of scores of pears, those pears that grew into a vibrant ripeness in Oregon, birthplace of my great-grandmother (she in the Willamette Valley). Memory has something to do with more of me. Nothing can be repeated in full, but everything is reflected, reflected upon, a refraction of the light of recognition. While sipping an armagnac earlier in the evening, I was struck by its vanilla butteriness and by the thought that, somehow, grapes had transformed themselves into this sweet and strong brown liquor with a depth and variance of flavor so much greater than wine. We remember even what we've forgotten. It is like muscle memory. We teach the mindless parts of our body to remember for us. That is how I taught myself to ski in my thirties. Muscle memory. It comes back. We remember. And muscle is just the memory of a mouse, a mus, because the word "muscle" is just a Roman (so Latin) metaphor: the muscle rippling resembling the surging (and muscular) running of a mouse. Every muscle is a mouse running away, is a memory of that running. We cannot escape the past because it adheres to us. And when I look at this photograph of a memory of a poem I wrote in an instant (for I am a creator of things in place, a creator of the, in the, moment), I think of a poem of Nancy's that haunts me, maybe because I know what it means, but I really do not. I have tried to remember, or tried to figure it out, or tried to assume it was a reference to something real, but I don't know, and I haven't asked. Nancy is a better poet than I (not more prolific, just better), and she is more careful with words, but her poems often have strange canted references to the past, to her reality, and I try to figure them out, always without asking her. Because there are some things we do not want to know, no matter how hard we struggle to learn them, to interpret them, to define them into place so that they cannot squirm away. It is a strange sensation, one of a memory I might not ever have had trying to regain its footing in my head, something to do with these lines:

What if you woke
one morning
to step out of the shower
glimpsing your wet
nakedness
stepping over the tub
out of the shower
and saw on the mirror
a series of thumb
prints thumb and fingertip
dots even dashes with frayed
edges written not in soap
but in the steam a clear
message since you could see

That is where I write, how I write, anywhere, any where, no or not where, but what could I have written? Nothing? Something? A poem? I write poems in the mirror. Or on it. And pomes in the steam of the glass of a window. Even poems on my palms. Every psalm is of the palms, especially on Sunday. But how does a memory of something I don't know haunt me? I want to understand a poem on my own terms, without the aid of answers from an outside source. I want to think myself an encapsulated instance of humanity, separated from all others, unique, given to expressions not interpretable outside of myself, yet I want all texts to be meaningful to me. We make sense out of the world, or we fail to make that sense. We have memories we will never use again, but we carry them within them as solid as a liver processing pear brandy. I think, sometimes, of that tall American persimmon that I found in my neighborhood in Goodlettsville, Tennessee, in the late 1970s. Its fruits were tiny compared to the Asian persimmon we could find at the market, and these were overpopulated with seeds, maybe five of them. I can't remember. Memories are as slippery as the eels I caught when I lived on the beach of the Caribbean in Barbados and could hold onto them only because I wore gloves. Those tiny American persimmons were still sweet, once they had ripened to an almost syrupy softness, and they made great food for opossums, but no-one ate them, except for me. I gathered scores of them (I could probably hold seven in the palm of my left hand), and I ate them because I knew I could, because they were a wild food, an American food, someone no-one normally ate, because otherwise that would rot orangely back into the earth, having served no real purpose, though maybe a new tree or two came out of this profusion of orange fruits. I am reminded of Tristram Shandy and his story, which is not the story itself, which is lost early enough, but which is the story of digressions, because there is never a single point, there is never a muscular river riding its way down to the open ocean, there are only tributaries off that river, and we follow them all as we think. It is late now, too late. I'd meant to get to bed early, but it's too early in the morning for that, so I'll go too sleep now. You see, I am of the west. Which means I am of sunset, and it is time to set. I'll leave open as many poems, as many words, as I can for you to read. Maybe some day you will remember one of them.

ecr. l'inf.