From “September Is”
Memory is deeply not alive: it’s a mock-up
And this renders it hateful. Yet, it is not a fiction,
it’s truth, indeed a sad and monstrous truth.
I was assigned to you, together we were
a beautiful and melancholic picture.
This last picture is the realization
of the overwhelming moment
in which the acute eye perceives you as a now
that is over. A now that is now fixed in the swept past.
Mary Jo Bang
