You who cannot remember anything before year nineteen
as if you remain a whiteboard cleansed and sanded until even the marker scars go into the light
or perhaps you are the explosion of white noise, a storm of lines and static.
What is it you try not to know? The forgetting so important, you do not know to forget?
The sun raises its yellow tail and you are sand on the beach,
clean without history, no knowledge of the erosion that created you, no memory of a larger rock.
How can this be true? How can a childhood be negated?
You do not know, you may never know, you may not wish to ever know—
And—then—in the shower when she places her hand on one spot—
then you feel the slight shiver of pain where pleasure hardens.
Can this be it? Yes, no, yes—who can say?—
and once again you find yourself locked in a barren land without landscape, without color.
Michael H. Brownstein has been widely published. His latest work, Firestorm: A Rendering of Torah was published by Camel Saloon Books on Blogs. His work has appeared in The Café Review, American Letters and Commentary, Xavier Review, Hotel Amerika, Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, The Pacific Review, and others. In addition, he has nine poetry chapbooks including The Shooting Gallery (Samidat Press, 1987), Poems from the Body Bag (Ommation Press, 1988), A Period of Trees (Snark Press, 2004), What Stone Is (Fractal Edge Press, 2005), and I Was a Teacher Once (Ten Page Press, 2011). He is the editor of First Poems from Viet Nam (2011).
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