While I was being born, the German Resistance failed
to assassinate Hitler, seven thousand
were arrested, twelve hundred Jews sent on a death march.
Well, not exactly. An approximation. Not exactly “while”
I was being born. I was slippery. Cry and Don’t Cry
was how I divided things up. In the Philippines that same day,
a coconut from fifteen feet up just missed my father’s
head. He wrote my mother a wildly romantic
letter also describing the water clarity and the fish
he almost caught with his hands. The clarity of his soldier-
letters, the exaggeration, the childish
exuberance of phrase! Of language overtaking truth
so easily it seems inevitable. Meanwhile, Great-Grandmother
was slowly dying in the one true featherbed,
Great-Aunt Rhoda rolled her feet on a bottle
in her closet, Nana picked her mums, the maid missed
the bus and Granddaddy drove her home,
mum until after she got out, when he said, “I don’t know how
these people live this way.” Events continue to take place
with dizzy simultaneity. At the cottage, the children
lean over the railing, dizzy with taping Mylar balloons
to the upstairs porch to dangle into the eating porch;
they tape crepe paper streamers
on the ceiling. They’re excited about the cake, the ribbons
they’ve tied on their presents for me. Which year is this?
They all wear down into one lump of memory,
one excitement. In 1969, Apollo 11 planted the first
memory on the moon. And Scott clearly kicked against
my stomach, although back then maternity dresses
hid the evidence. Always something exciting, even gathered
from view. Especially if gathered from view. Last year
on this day what was growing in my body
was gathered from view. The excitement has died down,
my head softening with hair, all hopeful again.
The secretary of state announces resumed peace talks
between Israel and Palestine. A judge has dismissed
a lawsuit between Woody Allen and Faulkner’s estate
for Midnight in Paris’s use of Faulkner’s line:
“The past is never dead. It’s not even the past.”
“All of the continents used to be one body. You aren’t
alone.” The past still exists in the luminous ether,
and also in Albert Goldbarth’s poem, where these other
quoted lines first appeared. They make me tender,
in a way, toward the mystical—the things
space is full of, and the way we’ve gathered them into
packages that pretend to come one after the other
because it’s too hard to open them all at once.