memory of hunger in the unmoving places                memory of

 

decay              memory of the small gift of you                 memory of

 

erasure           you and I disappear into a memory of

 

leaving                         out the door to go to work          you left that image

 

revolving through my dreams                           memory of the path lost

 

and you circling back to find me  

 

memory of rain high in the mountains

 

remember watching the clouds slide down the slope

 

memory of bullets

 

memory sliding out of my brain

 

memory of blood bound to the side of the hill

 

memory takes hold of nothing and shakes it awake

 

only to walk out the door

 

I take hold of it                        I bind it

 

I take hold of you, too, Manuel, and I bind you

 

just as my blood is bound to the memory of your sad eye

 

just as I take hold of the Colombian government

 

and those puppets strung up in the trees

 

planted with money from the North—

 

my corpse is dissolving into the river

 

into the reddened waves slapping the bank

 

and the rain washes out

 

the iron in my blood                            each particle stands on end

 

sifted through and partitioned along synapses

 

startled at the sound of an ambulatory moment in the sun

 

just as you and I disappear into the water like two snakes enmeshed

 

diadem blazing inside me as the ash covers your wet face

 

snakes struggling to claim the dead bird in their throats—

 

memory of my son

 

when he dives into the eddies and whirlpools

 

cut by the river’s course

 

when he lets his body be dragged underwater

 

until drowning seems a certainty

 

until the hand of the Lord lifts his head out of damnation

 

and he goes back to the beginning to dive again—

 

memory disappeared beneath the river

 

how much now does the Lord raise up

 

to dance with the corpses in the forest

 

of those disappeared in full daylight and those disappeared

 

at night

 

how many to disappear for Marquetalla

 

my son remains on the cliff

 

beckoning to the firing squad

 

raising their arms on the shore

 

both are so darkly glimpsed beneath the waves

 

I can no longer tell one from the other

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

TIM VANDYKE has published Topographies Drawn with a Divine Chain of Birds (Lavender Ink/ Dialogos, 2011), Fugue Engine (Cannibal Books, 2012), Light on the Lion’s Face: A Reading of Baudrillard’s Seduction (Argotist, 2012), and Farallones (Garden Door Press, 2018). His recent work has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Typo, and elsewhere.