A garden lined in railroad ties. Mint taking over pansies and petunias, and zinnias i could have used as parasols. A little cement mushroom my Mom found on the side of the road and later snuggled next to the wild strawberries. Apricot roses and elephant ears. A Staghorn fern pinned to the Bay tree out back, and a grape arbor linked by a clothesline to the barn. An afternoon with Mom spent driving Dad’s blue Chevy out to the edge of town and filling up the bed with manure. For the garden. A room with a wooden birdcage holding quietly chatty finches, spider plants, and the record player. It occurs to me that my parents had good taste; or, i am remembering it as what is basically my taste now. And this is how, like waking up, i play back the parts like flipping through pictures of other people’s libraries. So many parts that most days my little room and easy memory–bent on letting everything in–argue about whether their future is junkyard or player piano. The problem, as always, is that i like junkyards. i like them on their own terms and i am genuinely content to wander and collect, but luckily i am also a sucker for the whizzing, possessive state of production. The question that actually worries me is more specific: how does one who whose stays bind her backwards move forward? A kind of generation that is very attached to the “re” in reproduction. Nothing new in order to make something new. A productive investment in returns. i am not a curmudgeon, in fact i have a tendency to move far too quickly. This is more about sorting for favorites before they fall, for the last time, through the net.

In her poem, “Diving into the Wreck,” Adrienne Rich writes: “I am having to do this, not like Cousteau with his, assiduous team, aboard the sun-flooded schooner, but here alone.” Alone/together: who can tell, really? There is the very real insurmountable distance of the couple, and the also relevant impact made by the group. The shorthand is community, but family applies here, too. How we behave in “private” is shaped by these larger interactions that take place in vastly different ways for anyone. And then there is the gigantic drag of the social. Chuck D: “No we’re not the same/cause we don’t know the game.” Fuck. It’s just a fact. It’s a different process when you have Cousteau’s little submarine shark to protect you from predation. Nonetheless, some of us keep diving. i saw Goonies. i know there’s treasure down there somewhere. i know we will be more than the 2 of Cups. And here is Godard whispering in 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her — lines dried and pressed in my memory fixed like sheets of wax paper like ‘dead flowers’ in my veins like the way your face changes when you find my face, finally, grinning huge at you in the crowd:

“But since social relations are always ambiguous, since thought divides as much as it unites, since words unite or isolate by what they express or omit, since an immense gulf separates my subjective awareness from the objective truth I represent for other, since I constantly blame myself, though I feel innocent, since every event transforms my daily life, since I constantly fail to communicate, since each failure makes me aware of solitude, since I cannot escape crushing objectivity or isolating subjectivity, since I cannot rise to the state of being, or fall into nothingness, I must listen, I must look around more than ever, The world, my kin, my twin.”

My kin, my twin. Marjorie Blanche Cardozo, my green-eyed, redheaded and freckled paternal grandmother, was a reader. My grandparents had a wall of books between the guest room and their bedroom. A quiet, dark hall in an otherwise consistently rambunctious household that i liked to linger in front of on my way to the bathroom. Grams would sometimes read me stories at the end of the hall, in front of the books, and quite often i chose her tattered copy of Little Black Sambo. There is an undoing i feel compelled to do with this memory. The tigers turning into butter like memories turning into words, but with the parallax attempt of reflexivity. Of fixing and footnoting. Tagging the memories with the information i could have used then, and am compelled to spend my time collecting now. Other memories are cut flowers on the table. i pick them up, breathe them in, and arrange and re-arrange them. Sure i pull off some of the leaves and trim the stems to allow them to absorb more water, but i need them to be seen, somehow. Minding the time, binding these little fascicles, i throw these ikebana for the heart: pine, palmetto, rose, dahlia, tears, hands, ghost, hope, chrysanthemum flower.