for Malani*
1.
The blinds drawn, she vacated her life.
Through grieving lips she survives our futures,
Being kept half-alive in an unconscious tongue
That allows a paragon of hope to thrive:
She was whole.
No—
Blotched out and blurred,
She became a lacuna,
A Platonic anamnesis.
"She is now in the company of angels":
The faithful mourners' conviction
And her integrity's fragmentation.
2.
Haunt of our occasions—
My musings' apparition!—
Brown eyes never shone so bright.
This poem follows up another poem I wrote titled "The Memory of Malani Sathyadev, Preserved on an Answering Machine."
She vanished in the shadows
of a mid-March Sunday’s moon.
When I first heard the news
an orange leapt from its bough.
There were bees in the flowerbed.
Grass shattered under my feet;
the smell of soot and ash
clung lightly to the breeze;
her smile fell
from a Hong Kong orchid
off Market Street.
The news first came
dead-ended and one-way.
Eight years’ reflection on that day
have hoped it was a turn in life:
the harrowing left onto Texas
from Mulberry Drive –
the high-branch’s snap
in the old, ragged pine –
when I was lost
in an Irish poet’s mind.
Hearing her voice, years since passed,
among this phone’s old messages,
I hear myself the day I heard the news –
Christianity’s eternity
became eternally confused.
Her long, black-curtain-hair,
the books piled at her feet,
the way philosophy
rolled off of her physique…
All I hear now when I think of that day
is the frail rattle of
a noose’s sway: pebbles beneath the midnight train.
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*Anamnesis* In philosophy, anamnesis is a concept in Plato's epistemological and psychological theory that he develops in his dialogues Meno and Phaedo, and alludes to in his Phaedrus.
It is the idea that humans possess knowledge from past incarnations and that learning consists of rediscovering that knowledge within us.
