#Memory Encoded
I. What Is Forgetfulness
Not dementia.
It is choosing to watch the present.
Dementia is when I cannot find my way home.
I prefer the sweetness in your smile
that greets me with no expectation —
my approaching death not on your lips.
The strength I once held fades.
Why should we carry the misery?
The promise of the new
should not bear the weight of the old.
My footsteps of July
do not dance on the ice of December.
Yet I would dance with you —
all shy and coy,
hoping you would favor me
with that first kiss.
II. Distance Is Close
You think because we have not spoken
you have proof we have grown apart.
Far from it.
We have only grown closer —
harboring the old harms,
vigilant in preserving the injury,
never moving on.
We have never been closer.
III. Pride and Falls
Can you recall how puffed up,
how bold you stood?
The world you would conquer
did not so easily surrender.
You weave a story —
challenge and victory,
defeat and tears,
gains never replacing the losses,
just keeping up.
Then the final struggle.
I have sat at his bank.
The water is never the same.
The edge shows erose bounds,
inching toward my seat — I will not give up.
The river will erase me,
wash me away.
Ashes are best left here.
IV. 温風至 — atsukaze itaru — “warm winds arrive,” opening Minor Heat
The sun keeps to no place. It moves, the earth moves with it, and the
orbit we call fixed is not. We spiral. We do not circle.
the walk smuggles time —
brand new, not a revisit.
Nothing has returned.
The gladiolus rise in the same place again, shining as the warm winds
arrive. I meet them like old friends. Without words I am back at this
time last year, still waiting on the findings — when their beauty could
not ease the ugly news the path report would bring.
These glads only shine. They ask me to be here with them. Can I accept
that they carry no memory, no knowing? The few days they stand are not a
countdown. I am not the same person. I think I am the same — but the one
who stood here last year did not yet know.
This year I know, and I carry more: memories of things I could not have
known then. Is memory an informal punishment?
I have rearranged; the glads sprout new. I gathered and stored; they
simply wintered, holding nothing, and now bloom with the same beauty. I
weigh the blossom down — I hang my misery on it — while the glad ignores
me and greets the day.
Does memory keep me on the path, or fix my every step? Could I be more
if I set down what holds me? If I do not fill the becoming space with
last year’s dread, will today just be today?
I cannot confuse continuity with memory. Continuity I can hold lightly.
Memory is the heavier load — it keeps what has already gone
discontinuous: the dread of the diagnosis, the surgery, the joy of a
finding that was not cure but no ongoing threat. Removed clean at the
margins. Nothing in the nodes. The continuity is here. The dread is
gone. So why do the glads return me to a suffering that is over?
Holding to the carried —
dragonflies hover mid-air,
there’s no place to rest.
V. We Rest Without Memory
I will not soften
what you showed me today.
I do not expect to see it again
in such sharp relief.
Not my first love —
only now my last.
You have forgotten
we have not always been together.
You hold my hand
as if it gives you life,
squeeze me into you
to catch the breath
that moves without clinging
to who held it before.
We rest without memory,
yet imagine a past
which is just as true.
Colophon
The work is personal. The material here is original arising directly from my sitting contemplation. It is protected under Any Note Press. It’s publication here permits no commercial use. All rights are reserved. It is offered for the benefit of one’s practice and nothing else.
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Any Note Press
A Note on the Work
I write from the conviction that the mathematics and the contemplative
traditions describe one territory. The physics is not imported to
decorate feeling, and the feeling is not versified physics; each looks
at the ground the other is looking at. When physics says the sun keeps
to no place — that the solar system is not a wheel but a helix drilling
forward through the galaxy, so that no orbit ever closes — it states
what forty years of practice taught me to watch directly: we spiral, we
do not circle. Nothing returns. That recognition is not astronomy
borrowed for atmosphere; it is the load-bearing wall of the whole
sequence.
The exactness in these poems is a physician’s exactness, and I intend it
as a moral instrument, not a clinical flourish. Removed clean at the
margins. Nothing in the nodes. Those sentences ended a year of dread,
and I set them down with the care I once brought to a pathology report,
because precision is a form of non-deception — a refusal to blur what
happened into something more bearable. But precision is not scientism.
Scientism would let the margins and the nodes have the last word. The
poem will not. It sets the clean report beside a question no instrument
can reach — is memory an informal punishment? — and refuses to let
either side dissolve the other. Diagnostics and dharma share the
sentence; neither is permitted to flatten the other.
The sequence turns on one distinction that took me long to earn:
continuity is not memory. Continuity is the field reorganizing — the
gladiolus wintering and rising in the same bed, the breath moving
through one body and then another, the water at the bank never twice the
same. Nothing there is created or destroyed; everything decays and
rearranges, and we live, always, a little in the past of it. Memory is
the heavier load, because it keeps carrying what has already gone
discontinuous: the dread of a diagnosis whose threat is over, an injury
preserved so carefully that it fuses us to the one who caused it. The
glads hold nothing and greet the day. I hang my misery on the blossom
and call it depth. The work is the difference between those two acts.
This is why the poems refuse the old consolation in which nature is a
stable archive of the self and memory is salvation. The flowers here
keep no past for me; they have their own continuity and owe my story
nothing. When the last poem says we rest without memory, yet imagine a
past which is just as true, it says it plainly: the remembered past and
the invented one are imputed now, in the same act, out of the same
emptiness. Memory was never a recording. This is not a bleak thought but
the ground of release — if the past is imputed, the dread hung on the
present can be set down without dishonoring what actually occurred.
I work in haibun and hang each piece on a kō — one of the seventy-two
Japanese micro-seasons — because the inherited instruments are precise,
and to refuse them would only impoverish the work. But I use the kō as
an anchor to an actual now: 温風至, warm winds arrive, fell on the day I
wrote, not as a nostalgic token of a seasonal order I no longer believe
is fixed. The tradition offered the best examples of its time; the
orbital dynamics and the pathology are the best examples of mine; what
both point at has not changed. I am not trying to rise above the body,
or the science, or the grief — there is nowhere above to go. There is
only the same interdependence seen at another magnification.
None of this is a thesis I am trying to prove; the distinction between
continuity and memory is one you practice rather than settle, and the
poems attempt it rather than argue it — holding the frame lightly enough
that the frame itself can be set down.
If the writing has one discipline, it is this: to hold the personal, the
medical, and the cosmological in a single frame without letting any of
them win — and to keep asking, of every recurring beauty and every
preserved wound, whether I am confusing what continues with what I
merely refuse to release.