With thanks to Andrea Camilleri
for “stanze di ricordi inutile” (room of useless memories)
We outlast the silence rising
Out of unfamiliar territory,
Follow the curve of a hill up
To lilac gardens and down
Along paved river walks.
You now face canyons deep
In my past. I face rainstorms
That drenched you long ago.
We all outlasted the silence.
We master languages not our own,
Even the first we learned to speak.
Words lost in rooms of useless
Memories surface, others scurry
Into holes as if frightened.
We find reasons to give
Them voice in new timbres,
Play with volume and speed.
We master words not our own.
We resist sleep long enough
To read deeply and broadly.
Yet so much is forgotten
Beyond passionate responses
To this man's meter, his formal
Garden, or that woman's
Bouquet of chosen words,
Her tangle of wildflowers.
We practice resistance.
Scrawled in journals, one or two
Lines all we can manage
Before dawn or after night fall,
We provide harbor for a phrase
Or two in the mist of daily tasks
Whose storms sweep chants
To sea, leaving, if we are lucky
Pebbles worn round and smooth
From lines scrawled in a journal.
We want to be heard, not just words
On pages absorbed by eyes,
But language sounded out--
In caves alone. A tide laps at feet,
Threatens us with drowning.
Also in roomfuls of people
Who choose the sight, sound,
Smell of us who want to be
bells, sirens, whistles, prayers.
Age spots color topography,
Indicate where islands erupt,
Where the ground might offer
Solid footholds. Veins gain
Prominence. Contours sag.
Borders are not always clear.
For this perspective
You have to attempt flight.
Time alters topography.
Let's not sugarcoat this.
But if we don't how do we
Look through mirrors?
Reflected maps betray us--
Skin as prison or stronghold,
Subject to burning.
We choke on truth,
Its taste on the tongue bitter,
So often history ignored.
We settle into aching joints.
Memories flow, no longer
Blocked by stones rolled into rivers.
We own strained eyesight.
Hearing loses decibels
At the high end or the low.
The labyrinth of mind
Turns into phrases all our own.
We settle down into the ache.
Dunes rise and fall underfoot,
Always more children on the horizon
Their bloodlines ever more distant.
Hot. We created them hot
Out of seed and sweat.
They dwell in sandstorms
Some of them of our making.
We live in more guilt than glory.
Dunes shift between us.
Can we stay where the dead
Are buried? Do we move on?
All is loss. If we leave, they'll still
Be dead. We'll be without
A country. Stories erode.
Our tongues stumble
Trying to preserve them,
Sentiment slippery,
Our choices or those of the dead?
The satellite looks down.
We watch its beacons after sunset.
Whether it moves away
Or the earth changes angles,
We won't listen when
Others say Don't let the dark in.
We invite it. Keep it company.
Cloak ourselves in humility.
Lift the heaviest words, I don't know.
The PDXAP Book Club is reading Personal Best; Makers on Their Poems That Matter Most. It has me asking which of my poems matter most to me. The core question posed in the introduction by Erin Belieu is What if we always got to choose our own poems to represent us in an anthology? The answer might well change from time to time, but I would choose Rough Terrain as that poem.
I knew the old man would be trouble. Everyone spoke of him with such reverence. Andrea Camilleri was a writer, a stage and film director, and a professor. His best-known character, Inspector Montalbano, found him when he was near seventy. They would be companions for twenty-six years.
It was through the television series, starring Luca Zigaretti, that I encountered Camilleri. The MHZ network also aired a couple of interviews with him. I know him through translations, so I have no idea how the Italian phrase “stanze di ricordi inutile” or the room of useless memories came to my attention. It comes from the book Salvo amato, Livia mia. The phrase refers to a room where the written journals of the deceased citizens of Camilleri’s imaginary Vigata rest. They remain unread and uncatalogued, an archive from which there can be no retrievals.
Are the living elders of our society “stanze di ricordi inutile?” I remember writing Rough Terrain as one of the most intense experiences of my life. It came to represent my gateway to old age, with Camilleri, a vital man in his nineties, as guide.
When individuals meet, each person bears a past, any or all of which may be shared. Much of that is accomplished through language. And written language has the potential to outlive the individual. But I refuse to cede my power as a life force with a voice. Bound to a physical body and a geographic location, not yet dead, I refuse to cede my power. Do I exist in a liminal space between the dead and the living? I cannot, will not, leave the dead behind. With age comes the awareness of a responsibility to them.
In this complex dance of pronouns, physical changes, and geographies, I attempted to contain a universe seen through the collective vision of the Elders. With trepidation I chose to use the pronoun we because I was a neophyte in the land of geriatrics. I was, and still am, a woman of young old age not old, old age.
Observing the paths of my aging grandparents and parents, I expected my environment to shrink. Like with witch in Wizard of Oz, I would shrink as the waters of time rushed over me. But I am no wicked witch; my goal is to earn the title Crone. In this process, Ars Poetica in Portland has been a major force in bringing me out of myself and into the universe described in Rough Terrain, which is expanding exponentially.
Comments