Two Poems by Allison Seay

Mother of Memory

In the dark, when it is silent as underwater,

I can hear bells ringing, knowing it is impossible.

But I lie there listening and wonder if it is you, a sign

of your return. I feel in my heart a tenderness and think

if I am just quiet enough you might appear

and tell me another story from your life before me

(about the schoolgirls who feared Madame

or when you went swimming in the dark

with women you loved

or rode a motorcycle through Barcelona, sipping gin).

You would remind me of our old joy:

peeling oranges in the yard, napping beside the plum tree.

These days I am a student of desire, not of divinity,

and my only true virtue is constancy:

the weather keeps shifting. I keep wanting.

The mother of memory must also be the mother

of sound, the mother of my muse:

Come back, I say, my impossible bell.

Mother of Anxiety

There are days each hour is a difficult swallow.

This hour I have wondered about a word that means until-ness,

a perpetual waiting like I am always waiting

for you. You who are my whole anxiety.

I look through the trees each hour

to see if it is you or not, that figure in the forest coming nearer.

Mother of Memory

In the dark, when it is silent as underwater,

I can hear bells ringing, knowing it is impossible.

But I lie there listening and wonder if it is you, a sign

of your return. I feel in my heart a tenderness and think

if I am just quiet enough you might appear

and tell me another story from your life before me

(about the schoolgirls who feared Madame

or when you went swimming in the dark

with women you loved

or rode a motorcycle through Barcelona, sipping gin).

You would remind me of our old joy:

peeling oranges in the yard, napping beside the plum tree.

These days I am a student of desire, not of divinity,

and my only true virtue is constancy:

the weather keeps shifting. I keep wanting.

The mother of memory must also be the mother

of sound, the mother of my muse:

Come back, I say, my impossible bell.

Mother of Anxiety

There are days each hour is a difficult swallow.

This hour I have wondered about a word that means until-ness,

a perpetual waiting like I am always waiting

for you. You who are my whole anxiety.

I look through the trees each hour

to see if it is you or not, that figure in the forest coming nearer.