A Lovely Valley Full of Promises

Too often when we try to remember everything about

The life we used to lead before we needed to recollect—

Those details, the places where we store our words

Disappear—and the memorable landscape a desert.

If we could recall those images, we’d feel the rain,

Or hear the gentle breezes, the childish play

Of spring in a lovely valley full of promises.

It’s what I was told and what I read yesterday,

And the echoes still resound, no matter what hisses.

If someone listened to our sighs or wiped

Our tears away, the way he used to do,

The sentences would form themselves again

And, in a dream of wild discovery,

We’d open up the darkest cellars of the past

And feel the pains of infancy fade away.

Whoever he was, the memory is gone, and dreams

However often they return, remain just that.

Perhaps it was always an apparition, trick

Of wishful thinking, wisp of empty longing.

But remembering is not tomorrow’s hope,

Forgetting the terrible ordeal we must endure.

Forgetting remains our one last expectation,

The certainty all else depends on, the place

We know for sure we can curl up inside,

Like an earwig that catches hold or a flea in heat.

Listen closely to the roaring of the ocean’s swell

Caught forever in a curly crusted shell,

You only hear the circulation of your blood

Independent of your heart’s desires.

Yes, there are times I wish to scream against

Injustices—the world I knew has disappeared,

The people I once loved are nothing now.

Who can I speak of about the joys I wanted then,

The pains that made life bearable and gave

It meaning when the news said all was lost and over.

No one wants to sing old funny songs

About shrimp boats and boneless bananas

And Lefkowitz the Cop who blows his whistle: Stop!

The darkness and the silence soften all my pains, and the joys

Have long since ebbed away like the evening tide.

And, yes, we have no bananas, and, yes, I will not dream

Impossible dreams that go down to the sea in the evening mist,

And the cars don’t have to listen when he blows his whistle.

And we can build a stairway to the stars, and climb that stairway to the stars,

And yet the angels who descend knock us off, and we fall to earth

And into the earth, and under the earth, and become the earth…