Imagining Memory / Remembering Imagination

She came again in a light summer’s dress.

The box. The lock. No key.

Imagine that! After all that time, to come again. To make her approach in a light summer’s dress, just as I’d always pictured it, but somehow more real the last time.

Always like a dream, with soft light, hazy, dust-motes and sun’s rays and then

she approached again in a light summer’s dress. Floral prints, breezy. Perhaps cotton. But nothing is simply cotton or silk or chiffon anymore, no, some bastardized blend or mixture of cloths and stitchings.

Nevertheless, she came.

I might have known before that she would. Where the dead go, or are. Might have known by that time, or deep enough in sleep, perhaps comatose, the locked box, the secret safe, the without key, that it resided somewhere down in there, somewhere always just further off. But not without effect.

No, it was not without effect I perceived her waltzing forth again, all calves and hips, slim-shouldered and ankles, her long goosey neck, a summer’s dress, aswaying, coming up the walk toward the house.

Must be 36 years, more or less, decades anyway, since before and then to now. Hadn’t expected a return. Might have, or hoped for somewheres secretly, but not expected. Not maybe or perhaps. Not even wistfully.

No, just flitting dreams or visions, sometimes sounds, like scents or memories of the dead. Occasional, accidental, ephemeral, nostalgic. No expected return. Past history.

Not this elegant aged woman wearing a summer’s dress, tottering up the walk, holding herself dignified, looking 19 or 25, but well beyond that, decades beyond and unexpected.

My own skin drained of its sap and crinkling. Spotted and buttoned and slack. My eyes burn from the dryness, always wanting to close, me always urging them open, just, probably, for such sights as these, some hope somewhere, not quite really a maybe or perhaps, no, nothing like that, but irrational, breathing, looking, listening about at my age. For something such as this: dignified first love now free of the world, unwanted and failing, and, alas,

she comes back in a light summer’s dress.

And I too old, too tired, to make the stairs, to holler out, to see,

I sit without believing my eyes, certainly not believing, (there was no perhaps or maybe)…no perhaps or maybe, just time coming on, asunder, crumbled, eroding, no eyes for that, for glimpsing an approach, no ears either, barely a lung for the breathing, just barely. With the music loud the melody line can be guessed at but no tune really, I don’t perceive an actual tune,

the songs, then, are gone. The songs are gone. And the trees, not well enough to see branches anymore, sometimes vaguely a trunk or a tangle, if old enough, if large and ancient, but no songs or views, really, no language…

especially not for this, though they say this happened, that nearer to the end she came back, on round the fence, walking the walk, opening the gate and come knocking, in an elegant summer’s dress, not for that, not I, no, not that much sense or detail without perhaps or maybe,

more like the comatose or anesthetized without enough dosage, something like that in my reading chair, at my desk, unable to be “through,” to cease altogether, just present there, something, to feed and to change and medicate, occasionally to move, perhaps a push or a roll-over or around, so as not to break anything not already broken, who’s to say, the children perhaps, or whoever “they” is, voices indistinctly murmured as if shouting about and around, not me, not for me to see or to say

how she might have appeared out of a glaring haze, what all sunshine becomes by now, a headache and a blazing fog, in a light summer’s dress, sure I see her all those years ago, that I might recall, perhaps, occasionally, like the dead, my parents, my children, my spouses, my love, occasionally in that way almost, maybe, like faulty memory bandied about or smothered together, flattened I guess, two-dimensional in there, behind the eyeballs, like a camera, nearly black and white, maybe like that I’ve seen her come around walking

but not with real flesh or real eyes, none of that lioness hair, no almondy skin, no hips no shoulders or neck long like a cobra, no, no hands there, no wrists or ankles, no voice,

just hazy, the fading-out of dusk or dawn, I guess is fading-in, but always dusk then now, dawn is just blindness. No details, no objects, maybe light, a little movement, no more beyond, and that from hearsay, like the children, the smaller ones, as a mouse in the house used to be, only from the corner of the eye then, only that, some dim sense that something went past, and at times it is haunting,

like that, might be, hard to say once you’ve almost heard them say “she was here” “A woman came to see you ‘pop’ or Mr. so-and-so, or somesuch, came back in a light summer’s dress,” they say.

What I might have given. The lock, the box, the key.

N Filbert 2012