PORTRAIT OF THE MEMORY
in an Oldsmobile in thick boots bearing a gift
of papaya in what resembles an Oldsmobile what
resembles a papaya the last of January three versions
of ice on the electric lines and elms the memory
stepping out of a green or brown car out of a Buick
in rough boots bringing home a papaya or a gladiola
or macaroons the memory bringing home its factory
scent of lubricant and steel shavings in a Ford
the memory home from its shift machining
hydraulic cylinders at the factory the memory home
in its scarf with macaroons or in its parka which was
the color of a papaya maybe this is July the humid
memory maybe the memory not bringing any more
than itself in shirtsleeves the too-warm memory
in a Cutlass arriving without any gift at all
*****
ZIRCONIA
Even after you wrecked my Chevelle and ran over my dachshund, after you bedded my chiropodist and confessed to the shaman you adored me no longer, even after you migrated to the low country, took up a new tongue and adopted a tropic demeanor, I hoped for one final letter, for a formal armistice or some kind of treaty. But you preferred the rigmarole unsettled. You favored the unended. As in the story in which the kid goes lost in the woods for seventeen rainy seasons, for so long he becomes convinced of no salvation and convinced he’ll have to live this way, filthy and rootless ever after, so that even when he’s grown and rescued and returned to the village, to grammar and vaccinations, he believes he’s a wolf, even in his grocer’s freezer and at the Labor Day parade, even when he nods off in a recliner or bites into an apricot or feels the first fluttering arrhythmias of I-love-you-I-know-not-why, he is naked and homesick, feral and wanting.
Jaswinder Bolina is the author of Carrier Wave, winner of the 2006 Colorado Prize for Poetry. Poems from his new new manuscript will appear in upcoming issues of Columbia Poetry Review, Third Coast, and in The Best American Poetry 2011. He teaches at Columbia College Chicago where he is the 2010–11 Liberal Arts & Sciences Emerging Poet-in-Residence.
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