A Southward Tide

Poems, essays and excerpts. A favorite quote or two. An observation. A compendium of imagery. A dream analysis.

Tag: memory

February 21, 2014

Memories of Koi

Behind the Episcopal church of my youth is a walled memorial garden and a koi pond. The Neo-Gothic structure dates from the 1920s, a booming era for South Florida architecture and opulence. After Sunday service, the church served refreshments under wide palm fans and the twisted spines of guava trees. I savored the cheap orange juice and the sugar cookies we were never allowed to eat at home. Crouched on a stone bridge in a white  smocked dress with a handful of pellets, I fed my orange, black and white friends over the broken surface of the black pond. The fish bustled for a turn, slipping around and over each other in exuberance.These memories surface like bubbles of unbridled rapture. Childhood time is frozen, crystallized into eulogistic forms. Back then, were they just the fish I loved visiting after the constraining horror of Sunday school?

Sometime in my listless twenties, I found the garden again flattened by the midday sun, sweaty and bland. There were less flowers and the fish were like bullies, a grotesque ball of wrestling pythons. I had lost my wonder.

I return to this concept again and again. The lost wonderment of childhood, the “growing up” that damaged my spirit. While joy is not the sole property of the past, it is something we must recuperate. It is not our lost youth. It is our lost soul. We can leave no stone unturned or else we all die the quiet deaths of adulthood.

In the garden once again, I rest in quiet contemplation.The longer I sit in stillness, the deeper and wider the garden becomes till voices rise once again from the dark waters, koi older than time itself swimming calm circles around the lily pads. How many wide eyes have they seen from their vantage point below the surface, cherubic faces gazing at them with the wonder of a billion earth-bound years?

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October 20, 2013

My Mother is an Extinct Bird

My mother is an extinct bird
sketched in children’s books,
surviving in imaginations
grand and small.

The old mantelpiece man
narrates this flight of auburn fiction,
his pipe alit by the tale’s wind.

How can I follow her
when she is a vellum-bound kite,
tracing pinpoint crescents across the sky?

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October 14, 2013

One Hundred Years Past

It was a long way she trod from
second one till a hundred past.

Paris bombed!
The wars did come and go.

From the windowsill, she sewed rag to rag
and watched them all. She tied her
things up in boxes stacked a century ago,
mended clothes pressed flat in a Norman cupboard.

She died in a modern hospital room
that resembled nothing the year she was born,
the early century – 1908.
She was just a child when all those boys died.

And then she bore her own in the second war.

Paris liberated!
Flags waved, firecrackers burned.

Years later, they fought.
My father left.

For decades, she was old.
We sat her at a table once a year
and smiled when she was gone.
She smelled like musty things.

How little we notice until they die,

then we try on their heavy shoes,
we unpack their boxes, flip
scalloped pictures, yellow and gray.

We touch their things as if
we knew how to cradle a hungry child
and yearn the taste of milk.

How little we build from souvenirs,
how little we cared to ask when
she sat old by the windowsill.

Life is long – but the same length for all,
the same second one till years gone past.
And the pain it takes to remember,
we soon forget.

She lived to a hundred and three,
and we shall soon forget.

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October 5, 2013

The Belle Glade Culture

Along the southern edge of Lake Okeechobee built up on the sugar cane flats is a dump of a city. As you drive through en route to the placid gulf waters, you lock the door, remembering to fuel the car in Clewiston, and pity those that endure these baked Central Florida streets. In the 1980s, Belle Glade was crack central; it had the highest per capita AIDS rate in the country, a case study for STDs which were shown in sex-ed to horrified middle schoolers all over the state. In 2010, the average violent crime rate in Belle Glade was over four hundred percent higher than the national average. Institutional poverty runs along clear racial divides with a third of the population living under the poverty line. It’s Muck City, the Florida that intellectuals mock with blogs entitled “Florida Man.” It is a sugar cane migrant farmer gang wasteland.

It is with this impression in mind that I was recently floored by an archeological exhibit of artifacts from the Belle Glade Culture, a culture that existed from 1000 BC till 1700. The Mayaimi people were centered around Lake Okeechobee until Spanish raids all but obliterated them (the few survivors evacuated to Cuba).  As a Floridian, I knew the basics about local tribes, essentially those that existed just prior to the arrival of Ponce de Leon. But the Belle Glade Culture was 2700 years old before it was decimated.

There were native Floridians in 1000 BC. Not the ‘natives’ that came down when Flagler built the railroad, not the ‘natives’ that live here year round watching the flux of seasonal Northerners, not even the natives that run gaming enterprises and sell cigarettes on their Seminole reservations. Under the defunct Glades Correctional Institution may be burial mounds, shards of pottery and sculpture, arrowheads from violent battles, canoes for fishing, two millennia of hunters and gatherers, laughing, crying, having babies and lovers. And for some reason, this brightens my perspective – this melancholic palimpsest of forgotten history.

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