erasure.

Time passes.

Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.

– Joan Didion, Blue Nights
quoted in an LARB review

I’m thinking now of erasure. That way that you can disappear from someone’s world even though you’ve just met them.

I often felt like this. Invisible and ghostlike. That great passions, intimate dreams and rare inspiration can so quickly evaporate in morning light. This last time reduced to a text message.

I’ve evaporated. Like so much red wine left at the bottom of a glass… Given a week, where angsty recollection, dreamy midnight pauses and the soft stubbornness not to clean the glasses and clear the table leave that time spent together a rippled dry plum red at the bottom of a glass.

Blood. Dead and dried, two metres away clinging to glass like the memory; but when approached still have the scent of that initial romance. Still, in it’s deadness when breathed recall that rarer time.

I have five poems.

But I know from too much experience that any effort to recall this time- To fix it in words, is its end. That drawing a mask from the feminine mystique constitutes a definitive symbolic violence– driving real love away with a symbolic replacement. Is it too much to turn a real moment into forms? Or is it never enough?