FORGET NOTHING

We owe it to our selves, not to shred
   the evidence.
I wish my wife had not torn 
   the woman’s letters, the woman 
      with whom she had an affair.
The transduction of moments into our story must be
   incumbent upon us all, not only the artists,
      because we need our previous I’s,
To keep our I’s and You’s honest,
   to flesh out the time
      line, connect the dots between the i’s.
  
1998—all big
   ideas and lush pop,
      all those women,
Me pouring pop
   art and angst and idea
      into them,
Trying out on them
   a theory about gender or about Greek 
      Tragedy in The Empire
 Strikes Back,
Ways to check the pulse, make friends 
   with death, the disfiguring fire 
      of intimacy.

I fancied the ideas essential
   enough so that sooner
      or later, I’d get them down
When the moment lends,
   but the moment just bends
      and breaks.
For I did not understand the central role 
   of the periphery, the milieau, 
      the momentum gained in the city and age,
The colors and soundtrack of each scene,
   the fleshy contours of nineteen ninety
      eight.
Perhaps the reasons still exist
   but the tableau that made my mien:
      gone forever:
the instinctive swing 
   toward the particular sliver 
      of light
like a supple-muscled swing at a hundred-miles- 		
   per-hour fastball, the afflux
      of sun and moon and preliminary-stage
lights, the perfect-sloped horizon or woman all
   funneled into an enduring image of the flesh
      of the moment,					
all this lost forever by the closure-artists		 
   and master forgetters, the felicitous tangle
      replaced by the revisions of a theme park planner soul.

And one day you may recall 
   the affair as evidence of either
      How Wrong or How Right You Were,
but what she was will be whored
   to the current image,
      to me, to May 2000.
And don’t you think 
   she should speak 
      for herself?

"Dammit Ana, was that necessary 
   to add?"  you second-
     guessed yourself,
and I cannot think
   of anything more necessary
      to add than the truth.
You tore the letter and thus tore
   the fabric of time 
      and the sacred heart of history.
The shame dissolves but the pure event must remain.
Keep the snap
   shot which cannot flinch,
      keep the text of her,
the text that curbs, 
   even a little bit, 
      our revisionary redemption.
There is no closure—
Keep the division of powers:
   executive I and judicial Us.
Keep the prints.
Forget nothing.
Want to know, lust to know.
Want to know the worst.
Just allow
   everything
      to inhere in all 
moments—there is no shame
   in that.