If sharing between two makes a memory complete,
what happens when one forgets,
and every Do you remember? is met with a blank look.
A shake of the head, No, I don’t remember.
I don’t remember at all.
Then it strikes you that you never really knew,
Could not have known, the exact map of his memories.
Their colours and contours, nuances, their proper indentations.
How long each stood in the queue waiting for his admittance.
So come, memories of mine, let me light candles and burn sweet incense for you.
Let me summon that day when, for the first time, we sat and talked until late in the evening.
It wasn’t so much what we said, but the way that trust, ever drawn by the open heart, Came in and settled itself in the room.
It was then I felt that whatever might come, I could find such moments again,
Or it would be worth the seeking.
Or the way he danced with three-year-old Zoë (not knowing I observed him),
But I saw how the tensions he had so carefully nurtured slipped for a while,
His face transformed by such delight, such gentleness!
I held that memory against the harsher times
When neither words nor silences could counter disillusionment, or
Calm the impatience with a world gone deaf to those ideals he had fought for all his life.
And how his voice could turn a lecture into a symphony!
His power of intellect, the elegant phrasing that rose or fell
on the under song of ocean tides, multi-tiered resonances, the soft swell of waves,
Water sifting through pebbles.
Where do I store a voice that caused the blood to leap inside the veins,
The mind to sound out depths I had hardly known,
The ear to hear how chords, captured within a phrase,
Could reinterpret meaning, spark illumination!
Now, I no longer ask, Do you remember...?