He was not always on top of his summer reports.
He regularly ran in the fields.
There were forests, but the only spots
He felt safe had man and beer
Or the concert hall where princesses
Gathered themselves for music.
The musical flow was hidden by reflections.
He had to put memory on them.
New information is impossible—
It is always partial and inaccurate
So our recourse is the alternative:
Synthetic pleasant memories.
Here’s where you intervene
And love, or the memory of it,
Hijacks sense, and my poem once again
Is a love poem—in the category made by that catalog.
If I may step out of my creation for a moment—
That always has to happen; every small change
Has to happen to the whole, until the whole,
Not just a part, is changing.
This is the terrible part of changing,
And why we want memories to stay.
I was walking along a sunny boulevard,
An intersection of many—far too many—things,
When I saw, at the outdoor café seating,
A pleasant female face, vaguely Mediterranean,
A face, too large, I noticed, for her body.
If I had first seen her face, close up, in a selfie,
I would admire the face I, in that moment, found unsatisfactory.
The impossibility of new information, always coming at us piecemeal,
To be accurately what it is—I don’t know who that jogger is—
Requires that memory, hidden in our minds, is our only comfortable
Accurate, whole, information, meant for adoration.
And so, knowing this, Mozart doesn’t make for us
Anything as vulgar as new “music,” but clumsy memories
Which greet us like dogs, or perfumes, or you,
And I was thinking of you—did you know it—anyway.