Even memory disappears.

I, who was accustomed to sleeping in total darkness, was bothered for a long time at having to sleep in this world of mist, in the greenish or bluish mist, vaguely luminous, which is the world of the blind.

Three young men in dirty work clothes
on their way home or to a bar
in the late morning. This is not
a photograph, it is a moment
in the daily life of the world,
a moment that will pass into
the unwritten biography
of your city or my city
unless it is frozen in the fine print
of our eyes. I turn away
to read the morning paper and lose
the words. I go into the streets
for an hour or more, walking slowly
for even a man of my age. I buy
an apple but do not eat it.
The old woman who sells it remarks
on its texture and tartness, she
laughs and the veins of her cheeks brown.
I stare into the river while time
refuses to move. Meanwhile the three
begin to fade, giving up
their names and voices, their auras
of smoke and grease, their acrid bouquets.
We shall name one to preserve him,
we shall name him Salt, the tall blond
whose wrists hurt, who is holding back
something, curses or tears, and shaking
out the exhaustion, his blue eyes
swollen with sleeplessness, his words
blasted on the horn of his breath.
We could go into the cathedral
of his boyhood and recapture
the voices that were his, we could
reclaim him from the brink of fire.

How did they survive
so much worse, the millions
with all of their scars!
What would these rivers be
without their weeping,
these streets without
their faith & sweat?

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
                yet men die miserably every day
                                               for lack
of what is found there.

In the freakish pink and gray of dawn I took
his death to bed with me and his death was my bed
and in every corner of the room it hid from the light,

and then it was the light of day and the next day
and all the days to follow, and it moved into the future
like the sharp tip of a pen moving across an empty page.

You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.

Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?

But I love to hear it sung;
how the waterlilies fill with rain until
they overturn, spilling water into water,
then rock back, and fill with more.

This is the burden a poet must carry with him
to the sea, the burden for a truth unfettered
by the promise of another morning.

The silence of the fallen vase / before it strikes the floor

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Words: Paul Bowles, Jorge Luis Borges, Philip Levine, Kamilah Aisha Moon, William Carlos Williams, Billy Collins, Anne Carson, Li-Young Lee, Kwame Dawes, Billy Collins.

Images: Yongjae Kim, Bruno Barbey, Rick Amor, Cesar Biojo, Simon Dahlgren Strååt, Unknown, Val Rossman, Robert Doisneau, Zao Wou-Ki, Joseph Elorza.

---

Edited and curated by Joshua Segun-Lean