Memory with Eyes

  1

There’s always a country different from yours.
Where the air is not so close. Where storms are
about to rage or raging already,
land sliding away and people with it.

You have learned to live here. You go nowhere.
How does it feel to live between oceans?
Like a river, you say. Always running.
Between two banks. Nothing like a sea shore.

What’s yours is mine, so now I can say I
am waking, sleeping, eating, and loving
in a way only you know how to do,
it is nothing like the way I was born.

When storms come here rivers dry up. Water
sucked upward by such air never returns.
When I go to sleep with problems, a dream
may turn to say, I am your solution.

I start for one coast and reach the other.
I like to get lost. Anything to live.
There are so many here who never leave.
They are fortunate to know where they are.

Unlike me, they stay. If they have problems,
they ask until they get the right answer.
They know I am one who can only ask.
Sometimes they come to me to ask for them.

2

No one knows a native from an exile.
One of the two knows how to stay alive
by learning to sacrifice the other.
There is a third one, Memory with Eyes.

When you can see nothing this one sees it,
though there are some things better forgotten
if not left invisible. This one, say:
Memory with Eyes you see vanishes.

Then you have to find another somewhere.
That means it must find you because it loves
to be needed. Something with no body.
Something that would trade memory for flesh.

This outlier anomalous inside
evokes without words the absence of names
in a country that is nothing but sky
whose clouds are letters of the alphabet.

(15 May 2013)

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander