More on: memory

THERE WAS a great blackened pan being eased out of the greasy oven by a tiny old woman in padded oven gloves. No one in the crowded kitchen—yellow walls, hideous mess, marijuana smoke and incense—came forward to help her. But someone, a joker, called out “What is it this time, Scottie? One of your concoctions?”…

So little was the warrior, how she held out her slimmed down arms to the flowers I carried and to all that which crumbled in such a theatrical New York evening she was lovely and bright, drinking the last of the champagne to avoid that burning in her throat— And she raised her clear eyes…

They went on and on, singing “In Memory Forever,” Though it seemed, rather, that what there was to remember Was only things falling apart, ice under the eaves, And the singing itself. On and on they went as they counted, recalling How many of them earth’s ice-mold had covered, While here and there hysterical women…

In fields where the late light lingers I can just see the last wild roses spangling the vetch and Johnson grass. Is someone walking there, bending to take in their lightest breath? Is it a girl in a blue-white dress? Even now the moon is rising like a blade above the hills. Sharp cries of…

At the Synagogue Rummage Sale during Holocaust Remembrance Day Basement, Butler, Pennsylvania, the gentiles bargaining for old tallises, worn yarmulkes, a torn challah cover, a stained torah, a hundred thumbed copies of Anne Frank— I walk out and past a circle of bat mitzvah-aged girls and our rabbi, who stops me and asks if I’ll…

DESIGN IS ubiquitous. Design in its graphic manifestations is, well, frankly overwhelming. Streams of printed ephemera constantly assault us, from cherished journals, to the slumping pile of unread newspapers shoved behind an easy chair in the corner, to the blur of billboards, fliers, bulletins, and posters cluttering our horizon. The democracy of digital invention compounds…

Forty times a day the journey of a lifetime Was the forty feet to the john Then falling into your chaise lounge, Spent sprinter, deep sea diver. Your oxygen line trailed after the weekends I drove down to sit a day or two: In the helmet of each breath, In your eighty-year-old bubble, We swung…

 Jeanne Murray Walker is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently A Deed to the Light (University of Illinois Press) and New Tracks, Night Falling (Eerdmans). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Atlantic Monthly, Christian Century, American Poetry Review, Georgia Review, Image, and Best American Poetry. She is also an accomplished playwright, whose scripts have been performed in theaters…

Soon, soon enough, all of this, this lived life, this navy-blue couch, your confetti-splashed, yellow-striped skirt spread across it, your lovely legs beneath the skirt, the joyous aroma of toast in the toaster, a ball bouncing and the cry of boys, all of it will assume the stilted look of my childhood photographs. 1958, ’59.…

for William Christenberry Some people have told me that this subject is not the proper concern of an artist or of art. On the contrary, I hold the position that there are times when an artist must examine and reveal such strange and secret brutality. It’s my expression and I stand by it. ——————————W.C. I.…