Memory
In the end, she forgot everything
except how to play the piano.
The nurse sat her at the keyboard
and she played for all the residents
in the recreation area
but when it was time to stop,
she couldn’t remember where she was
and became afraid.
Sometimes art finds a way to preserve
the pleasures of consciousness
but more often it’s the same bars of Chopin
over and over until the mind is dust
+
is a fragment of a poem I found
in the back of my desk drawer.
Had I written it?
I must have written it because it’s about my grandmother—
+
but I don’t remember writing it.
Down the block, the high school is letting out.
I can hear the school bell chiming, chiming
and the revving of those lunatic engines
that have idled too long beneath dying oaks,
and I think of Tommy driving fast
down the backstreets of Cleveland
+
and all I can do is hold onto my seat
and close my eyes
while the music plays loud and Tommy shouts,
Fuck, yeah,
speeding past the garbage cans that line Lee Road.
+
I like to think my youth lives inside me
as memory lives inside time.
Wayne, sipping his Diet Coke
one rainy afternoon in the university parking lot,
told me poetry is a kind of memory,
is a way the soon-to-be-dead
can talk to the not-yet-born.
Just then,
+
a black chasm opened in the asphalt
and I fell into it,
down, down
toward the hot and glistening center of the earth
+
and I’ve been falling
for decades now
into memory and fire and the deep
subterranean caverns,
the steaming lakes far below the rumpled crust
+
of the slowly rotating plastic brain
at the science museum, its pink folds glowing
as it turns on its platform
while my grandmother looks at her watch,
says, kiddo, it’s time we got you back home,
time we got you back for dinner,
+
those snowy Cleveland weekend afternoons
when things were bad at home
and she drove me to the museum
to see the fossil trilobites and dinosaurs
and the model brain that glowed when I pressed the buttons
hippocampus, amygdala, prefrontal cortex,
pink and yellow lights
until dinner and the quiet remonstrances
that went with it—
+
Tommy, these days, is also dead. He drove
right out of this poem
into an embankment near Fort Bend.
Now he’s circling the moon
like glittering dust. Or so I like to think.
I want to live
+
inside my poems
like a tapeworm.
+
Anyway, this fragment I found
crushed in the back of my desk drawer:
she panicked because where was she?
Where was she?
She didn’t know, and when she looked at me,
I was no one she could recognize.
She shrugged my hand off her impossibly thin shoulder,
until the nurses soothed her
and led her to her silent room.
I never finished the poem about her
because it was too sad and none of it
was helpful to anyone.
KEVIN PRUFER is the author of nine books of poetry, including The Fears (Copper Canyon Press, 2023), and a novel, Sleepaway (Acre Books, 2023). He directs The Unsung Masters Series, a book series devoted to brining great but forgotten writers to new generations of readers.