BRAIN MATTER
Where would you be, she wondered,
without your
fathoms of memories.
Where would you be, she asked,
without your
raptures & shadows,
your flashes
of turbulence,
your atonal
impulses
& your salted sadness.
She counted
the bumps on my vertebra
and the
rate of my amnesia:
Is it safe to forget, she asked,
the proustian passage to your hall of mirrors?
It’s not nice to relate to a corpse
and shrinking
cells, she observed.
She spoke
with the power of gentle rain,
or a
woman who walks confidently
the
corridor to a refuge ward,
where
silence becomes compulsive,
a personal
anthem.
She overstepped the bounds, I thought,
as she insisted I relive
my roomful of mirrors,
my insomniac addiction
to emergency drifts,
to ambulance pitches
& electronic funeral music.
And I swaddled
her with white moss.