1.
Memory pushed to the far back of head
takes the shape of its container
looks foggy and lost and way past its
date
Memory prompts an early morning nausea
in me, a lacking appetite but still the
need
to eat something, anything at all
if only to fill the internal void
Memory is best undredged to the surface
left to settle and rot in its suspended
state
to be seen for what it is, for what
it’s worth:
the spoils of imagination, a long-gone
expiration
a waste marked by some arbitrary stamp
in time
Memory is murky as its metaphor (wait
for it. . .)
that which is not even mine but still
remains
as a background glimpse, as a sickening
funk
to pollute the communal fridge with its
influence
(—here) is the cloudy gallon of curdled
milk left
to fester into gel, disowned but not
disposed
Memory swirls in its glaze like a
mystic’s ball
as I watch this film begin to churn,
materialize
I hear the sharing of this memory from Zach
its firsthand holder, and my dear older
friend
late one November night as he tells of
witnessing
a snake enter his kitchen, how he’d
froze with fear
as it slithered across the tile floor
towards his father—
Memory of a father standing there at
the ready,
a shovel in-hand, hovering behind the
snake’s head
as he asks, “You want it gone?” and the
scene responds
with a quiet nodding, “Yes,” followed
by a pause—
hardly registered at all—just before
the subsequent clunk
of shovel thrust down is heard, the rapid
detachment
of head from continuous neck is
observed through eyes
that want to be closed but are, for
whatever reason, not.
2.
And so here, now, and there, then, some night
back in November outside of a bar, listening to Zach’s initial rehashing—what I
am left with currently is, in actuality, a recasting of this story with my own
detached father as the lead, resurrected from memory with those same dark eyes
and thick mustache and big lips and light-blue jeans and all—he exists once
again, in some suspended state of preservation, wrapped up and frozen in
memory’s cellophane, crystalized in my mind at some vague indistinct age
representative of the last few years of his subsistence in family photo
albums—on the back porch in cut-off shorts grilling burgers, him sitting with
me propped up on his lap at his desk smiling kindly and looking much healthier
than the last picture I would ever see of him while he was still alive—a
mugshot of him and his partner my sister had found online back in 2009, almost
a decade since the divorce and six years since our last visit and three or so
years since the last phone call and five years prior to the cancer eating him
from the inside-out—and yet I see him again here, now, standing before me in my
childhood kitchen he never once cooked breakfast in, in a suburban house he
never once stepped foot in, 782 miles removed from him and his New Jersey home,
our previous home, at an address he wasn’t permitted to know for the first few
months out of fear he would break the court order and show up unannounced,
would break in and bug the place with tape recorders and cameras just like he
had at our townhouse in East Windsor—timeless in jeans, shovel in-hand, here my
father exists again in the curdled dream theatre of my head, my fridge, in
milk, in memory, seeking to protect me against harm in the exact opposite way
he did everything else, in a concerned voice I don’t entirely remember as his
own, he asks, “You want it gone?”. . .
3.
But apparently I got it all wrong.
Later on that week, once I finally mention this
all to Zach—about how each consecutive night I’ve been dreaming, reliving so
vividly this snippet of his own childhood memory, of his own father in the
kitchen with the shovel and the snake, that I’ve found myself starting to
accept it as the truth, believing it to be my own—
(I also try and describe this rather loose
metaphor I’ve been working on between this out-of-viable-date memory and my
roommate’s gallon of spoiled milk I’d discovered earlier that week in the back
of our fridge but still felt reluctant to throw away, and Zach says, “Feel less
reluctant about trashing the metaphor, it sounds a bit contrived. . .”)
—and he tells me, “Sorry, bud. But you kinda got
it all wrong.”
Zach proceeds to explain that this story he
shared with me that November night outside of that bar wasn’t even from his
childhood, but had only happened some odd years ago, “. . .despite my childlike
dread of a little snake.”
He tells me also that it wasn’t his own father
who killed the snake with the shovel, but actually his father-in-law, Ed.
And also: That whole scene didn’t even go down in
his kitchen, but rather outside on his farm.
“I think the shovel,” he says, “is sort of a dead
giveaway. You know?”
I just shrug, feeling like an idiot, and
apologize to him.
Because apparently I’m a bad listener.
Because apparently I was too drunk to listen in
the first place.
Because apparently I don’t know what’s real
anymore, and don’t even really care.
Because apparently the most comforting memory I
now hold of my father—of any father figure—isn’t even mine, and doesn’t
actually exist at all.
4.
And yet still, I don’t want it gone.
Stephen Wack's new chapbook, "Loneliness & Other Human Endurances (haha, etc.)" is out now, available at the Hendershots bookshelf. On twitter: twitter.com/papiermachismo
