When the moon was full, the three women remembered the same event, even though none of the women could remember the event actually happening to them. Then, as the days passed and the countenance of the night sky changed, the memory would fade and the women would pass, like the moon, into a period of forgetting. In this period of forgetting, their lives could be described as normal, everyday, the sort of thing you wouldn’t find on camera or any other sort of dramatic work. But then the moon would return to its size as a matter of angle and exposure to the sun in its orbit, and the memory of the event would return and each of the three women would feel it, like a great moon in their throat or the color of the moon in their throat; they would feel the suddenness of the memory; they would feel its thickness, its color, how it branched off and split from its main bulk and threaded coils of itself into the forest or into the desert. They would feel how the memory of the event in question sometimes walked silently. Other times the memory entered wearing iron boots or blaring bells and a trumpet in a room with wood or marble floors. For each of the women, the memory could be blue, the kind of blue of October moons, or brownish orange, the orange of dried apricots, or purple, the purple of hunting, the purple that comes to you when you think of a cold night and remember that the lights of the house are just about to come into view. Moments of levity would sometimes come with the memory of the event, moments of great pain and sorrow. Other times they would laugh or they would cry out in the dark at the event’s return as a shared memory. Each woman, of course, had an impression of Julius Caesar or Napoleon or Churchill and sometimes the memory of the event would take on the characteristics of the shape of Caesar’s nose, Napoleon’s hands, or Churchill’s ankle and they would consider this surprising or fantastic, an impression they would want to remember and keep fresh in their minds, but it was impossible because soon the memory of the event would disappear, like a lamb or a small dog into the great body of a python or an anaconda, and it would seep into those places where forgetfulness is palpable and genuine and distant. But, whatever the shape, whatever the image, it was the same for each woman, exactly the same. It come with the fullness of the moon and then it passed on with time, for each woman identical, for each simultaneous and always amazing.
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100 Days :: Summer 2011
This will be my fourth year participating in the fun, exciting, and challenging 100 Days projects: year 1 I wrote one hundred poems; year two I wrote one hundred stories; year three I wrote 100 fictions. For 2011 I will round things out with another 100 poems.
But what's the intention. This summer my focus will be on hunting things down and tagging, hyperlinking, and using social media to identify those found items that inspire the poems. I will be watching for what the artists, musicians, and other creators do and will try to make poetry out of "found relationships." But also thinking hard about imagery, language, and orthographics. I've never been comfortable with punctuation in poetry but I am fascinated by putting heavy trucks on the edges of leaves or turning one celled creatures into things that point north, where yellow ducks live. -
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