Memory in My Hand

     There is the Salvadorean sky on my computer screen. I can enlarge the image to look at the waves on the beach, and see strips of cloud move across the undulating sea. The images are made of pixels. They can be adjusted for size, for memory, and for quality. However, the world remains elusive.  As the Russian poet Yevtushenko wrote, “If you grab life’s mystery by the tail/it slips through your hands so smoothly.” How we strive to hold on, more tightly each time, and again the same slipping away.

     We love photographs. We try to hold these pictures in our minds, and the pixels help, but how to hold on to the spirit of a place remains a mystery. If we could really feel a memory, feel it cold or burning in our hands, something which affects our flesh, maybe then we could be time travelers or call death’s bluff.

     The role of the poet is to create a place in the palm of the reader’s hand where the improbable is true, tangible, transparent. Can you feel the smell from the first time you walked inside a dairy barn? Do you remember finding a day’s worth of adventure in a small patch of grass? Do you still feel your first kiss on your lips, and do you wonder if the same stars you watched as a child are still burning somewhere in the galaxy’s cradle? The poet must remain in infatuated with the tangible and in love with the unknown. There is no other way to hold in your hand the invisible, the love that sustains and creates art.