The Five Remembrances

Amble in one direction—there’s no loop trail in these woods. Aging’s about

bureaucracy, its tedium, and border crossings that close behind you, and the

cusp of nothing: seed, sprout, flower, fruit, seed, sprout, and on and on, no last.

Death isn’t last, either, though lasting. Finally, predictably, one wisp of a day

everything changes. A scan, a blood test, even your bed is prescribed rest, or the

fall happens and you realize succumbing to gravity isn’t half-bad, the continents

gently drifting beneath your life raft, and the ubuntu of it all leaves you touched.

How many viruses see you as career move, cancer cells as a starter home? And

isn’t real generosity giving of yourself, giving what you most hold onto? There

(Just in! Breaking news!) will be no appeal; the sentence must be served. It was

knuckleheaded of you—as in, human—to think otherwise and to think that a

life consists of thoughts you sift like lumpy flour, thickening the gravy on your last

meat, the one no Heimlich will dislodge, expel onto the lace tablecloth the day

not even your mother’s trained finger can detect breath from your nostrils or

open mouth, proverbial pie hole, your rictus of collapse, hungry sink hole in the

Pennsylvania, no, make that the Scranton your face has become in its last

quarrel with inevitable. You put on your striped pajamas and practice every night,

releasing yourself as your father once did, holding you in water, then suddenly not, a

skill like living with less, memory chipped away, a rock of cocaine, chunk by chunk.

Tell your friend if you lose each other in the mall to meet by the Payless at ten of

underworld where mycelium will knit you together again in moist gossip. The earth

values only your topographies, attempts at elevation, your San Andreas fault split

wide, your riparian battle against erosion, the doltish lava you managed to shut off.

Xenolith, a fragment of rock embedded in another rock, belongs to this terrain. It became

your golden shovel, another’s words inside your own, inheritance and fusion. The

Zygote is similarly diploid, a fertilized ovum. On Google, it looks like an aureoled moon.