---
title: Riptide of memory
genre: verse

project:
    title: Stark Raving
    css: stark
    order: 16
    next:
    - title: About the author
      link: about-the-author
    - title: The Sixteenth Chapel
      link: sixteenth-chapel
    prev:
    - title: |
        Something about all music being performances of 4'33"
        in places where other bands happen to be playing
      link: music-433
    - title: I think it's you (but it's not)
      link: i-think-its-you
...

Inside of my memory, the poem is another memory.
The air up here is thin, but the wind blows harder
than anywhere else I know.  It threatens to rip
my body away, like an angel of death, to the stars.

In Arizona, I thought I would forget the rain,
forget its sound on a roof like a hard wind, forget
its smell like a far away ocean.  Luckily for me
it rains here.  Luckily, because I forget too easily.

In a dream, my father is caught by a riptide off-shore.
He's pulled far out, far enough that the shoreline's
a line in his memory on the horizon. I can see him
swimming, hand over hand, pulling his small weight

back to land.  I see him as another shipwreck victim,
coughing sand and seawater, beard woven with seaweed.
I see him laying there a long time.  I see all this
as he tells me the story, years later, the riptide

only a ghost in his memory, I only a child falling
asleep.  My mother's making mayonnaise rolls
in the kitchen, a recipe I'll send for years later,
in Arizona, in the monsoon season, when my thirst

pulls me back home, my memory's lonesome twinkle
like stars above the mountains.  I'll send for it
and try to make them, but in the thin air they'll
crumble into dust like desert air, like a memory.