Memory Devices

“I have many times taken / some cafe’s small packets of sugar,” writes Jane Hirshfield in “Souvenir,” “so that in Turkey / I might sweeten my coffee with China, / and in Italy remember a Lithuanian pastry.” How does the past flavor the current moment? In the January 2015 Poetry, memories season experience with both sweetness and tartness, sometimes in equal measure.

Tommye Blount’s “The Bug” begins in an innocuous present, with an insect that

lands on my pretty man’s forearm. Harmless,
it isn’t deadly at all; makes his muscle flutter
— the one that gets his hand to hold mine, or
ball into a fist, or handle a gun.

With its tiny bug and pretty man, the situation at first seems “harmless” enough. Yet Blount steadily builds tension. Why reiterate the harmlessness of the bug (“it isn’t deadly at all”) unless harm is on the speaker’s mind? Thanks to the first line’s ambiguous grammar, we can apply those overly innocentdescriptors not just to the bug but also to the other man’s arm; might it be his boyfriend’s irreproachability he’s awkwardly insisting on? Maybe so: the “pretty man”’s hand can “hold mine, or / ball into a fist, or handle a gun.” With each or, the sentence moves deeper into dangerous terrain.

And “The Bug” is filled with ors: the following lines tell us that the insect is “a ladybug / or an Asian lady beetle” or a blowfly; the pretty man is either “at ease, or / plotting like the bug,” and he is “dreaming of an enemy, / or me.” That final phrase renders the speaker interchangeable with a foe—an echo of the boyfriend’s slide from sweet to aggressive. “The Bug” traffics in such troubling slippages.

Ultimately, the poem skids from oscillation into sureness—and from the speaker’s perspective to the boyfriend’s:

                       No, he is not
asleep. He’s wide awake and wants me to tell you
I’m wrong. Blowflies don’t eat skin,
they lay eggs on skin. He knows all about
blowfly larvae. Napoleon used them
to clean war wounds, my cold pretty man
says in that pretty way,
with his cold pretty mouth. He’s eaten plenty
of bugs before. On night watch,
over there. Over there, they’re everywhere.

This stanza puts an end to the speaker’s wavering. The boyfriend is not asleep, and unlike his companion, he not only knows about bugs—their uses, their activities—he’s actually eaten them.

The poem’s final lines deliver a revelation, if indirectly. The boyfriend is a veteran; he has been “over there”—a term that recalls the World War I song of that title. And just as he was on “night watch” during his service, so is he on a form of night watch even now. During this buggy episode, the pretty man seemed to slumber but remained alert, on guard; no wonder his muscles made the speaker think of violence. Knowing the man’s past prepares us to spot an army of war-related terms, some of them puns (“gun,” “at ease,” “swats,” “enemy,” the “arm” within “forearm”). The pretty man’s history has infiltrated the couple’s present, has even influenced its language. This poem shifts between past and present, between over there and over here, just as the speaker shifts from companion to enemy and the bug from beetle to blowfly.

Rafael Campo’s “The Chart,” another meditation on memory, is similarly marked by fluctuations. Like Blount, Campo makes striking use of or, and here, too, sliding from one possibility to the next prepares us for a slide from present to past. Campo describes a medical chart that “says fifty-four-year-old obese Hispanic / female” — words that get him thinking:

I wonder if they mean the one
with long black braids, Peruvian, who sells
tamales at the farmers’ market, tells
me I’m too thin, I better eat; or is
she the Dominican with too much rouge
and almond eyes at the dry cleaner’s who
must have been so beautiful in her youth;
or maybe she’s the Cuban lady drunk
on grief ….

Perhaps, he concludes, it’s the one who reminds him of his grandmother, “who died too young from a condition that / some doctor, nose in her chart, overlooked.”

As in “The Bug,” a final revelation about the past lends new meaning to the rest of the poem. For doctors, Campo hints, “overlooking” is both easy and fatal—particularly where certain populations of patients are concerned—and so his poem refuses to overlook anything: it gazes hard at several women and describes them in detail, telling us what they say, how they look, and how they feel. It rebuts the vague label “Hispanic” by pointedly mentioning nationalities. “The Chart” is truly an anti-chart, an insistently intimate document.

The importance of looking is also a theme in this issue’s special feature: poems written by the residents of Our Little Roses, an all-female Honduran orphanage. One girl writes that she has been “invisible all her life”; together, the seventh graders at the orphanage wrote a poem called “Invisible for All to See”:

Para a driver who has worked here twelve sweaty, damp years and was an orphan;
Para the guards, the catrachos, who are like big strong heroes who protect the girls (one is missing an eye);
Para the gangs, who brag about who they kill with their weapons, but sometimes they, too, do good things for their families .…

In his poem, Campo slides from a memory of one person to a memory of the next; his sharp recollections testify to the attention he has paid each woman. Like Campo, the girls pay attention to members of their community, and describe them carefully in a poem; they insist on seeing, and thus on remembering. And by writing these poems, they insist we see them, too.