Note

Angie Estes

They wrote to say they'd found my mother wondering 

 in the garage -- like entering the ethereal（天上的） sphere, 

 I thought: drawing near to its desire, so deeply 

 is our intellect immersed（专注） that memory 

 cannot follow after it, as if desire were a fugitive 

 dye made from the blue stars of the forget-me- 

 not and hell could be defined as that which cannot be 

 forgotten, the damned condemned to go on 

 like Paolo and Francesca in desire but unable to 

 recognize what could move them so 

          *    *    * 

When I was a child, my mittens were attached 

 to each other, their cord running under 

 my coat from hand to hand like the blue 

 veins in the clear plastic Invisible 

 Man I assembled in the basement, and after 

 he left assisted living, my friend's father 

 kept asking, What if my mother dies 

 again? What, I thought, if she slips off 

 like a glove 

          *    *    * 

                              In paradise, 

 Dante says, we will have only a memory 

 of having had a memory, now lost 

 like the photograph of my mother's great 

 grandfather printed from a negative made 

 from a photograph of a negative, which we 

 Xeroxed for keeps: it's the same old 

 story of the Perseids, their gray hair 

 streaking the sky the way ethereal 

 is streaked by real 

          *    *    * 

Like denizens 

 of the cadenza（装饰乐段）, cicadas（蝉） scratching 

 their cicatrices（伤痕）, a star shines until day 

 begins to lighten the sky, the shining 

 gone though the star remains, not 

 shining but not yet gone, still 

 moving across the heavens right up 

 to the moment the sky turns 

 sky blue.