A Sort of Memoir (after Louise Glück)

I was born skeptical, under the sign of Gemini.

The only intelligent one of my so-called friends said

I was a philosophical miscreant, a bear in a depressing

life. Cold comfort in anyone’s age. I grew up on the edge

of a medium-sized city in an unremarkable family.

I was taught gestures of faith and the forms of patriotism.

In the country’s brick-squared schools from an earnest tribe

of teachers, I learned of improbable adventures and wondrous

transformations and distant threats. No war and no famine

touched me. I lived an ordinary life, distinguished

only by my point of view from a million others—

all claiming uniqueness. Around my circumspect island

of a life, everything ran fast—out into space and in

toward the double helix. From my elders, I had a philosophy

of altruism inside a mantra of love—such as it was. And

when I wrote, if my tropes were fixed, it was because I

needed only a few words—I never knew who’d hear me.

But sometimes unbidden, a picture—thin as sliced tissue

for a pathologist—filled my invisible eye—some mountain

roadcut with a pipe flowing chill water, a field of snow

peopled by iced trees and all washed by that impossibly

crisp blue, but it took me a long time to learn words’

destructive power in the gut and blood. Words were piranha

nibbles that made lace of what they claimed to be private

and holy, and it was like remembering my wedding pictures

better than my wedding. Maybe I was celibate.

It seemed impossible that death’s deluge drowns all that.

Worse is being forgotten. I could remember my grandma

but not her mother. I even forgot that so old name,

and if I knew it when I saw it in the granite graveyard

somewhere in a far-away place—names with circles

for umlauts and fish-hook letters—all I had afterward

was a snapshot in my brain, and it too one day winked out.

Then I was a name with an inaccurately recalled CV attached

to certain things. And then these things, soon enough

cooling in my hand, became just things. And

they were stolen or broken or valued abstractly

for a surface existence that never was me anyway …

my memoir a remainder in the bookshop of ghost tales.

By Susan Maxwell Campbell

From: United States