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Author’s Statement — This poem came about after I'd been fortunate enough to attend the Prague Summer Writers Workshop. I would spend days wandering through that beautiful city, and these were the images that kept trying to find their way into language.
Jon Pineda is a multi-genre writer and the author of six books. His novel Let's No One Get Hurt (FSG) won the Library of Virginia Literary Award for Fiction, and his poetry collection Little Anodynes won the Library of Virginia Literary Award for Poetry. He teaches at the College of William & Mary.
Issue 22, 1998
Losing a Memory
After watching a woman’s fingers
collapse into an old loaf of bread
and scatter its pieces over a river,
I have tried to remember how water held part
of an evening sun, itself held back by a shadow
of spires on the hill, gently tapping along the Vltava until
swans disrupted the water with their V’s.
It was almost communion, and yet, even this thought
of almost being something slowly passed
as the swans bundled together, diving one
after the other for remnants long gone.
And earlier, I thought I saw her in the crowd
rising out of the metro stop at Staromestska,
her eyes opening the way each umbrella spread
beneath a light rain ending in the street.
Now I know it was only the way those strangers disappeared,
huddled and turning into alleyways or even sound. A horn
from an approaching car made me realize I was standing
too close to the curb. Its driver screamed
in his language as he passed, shaking his fist
into a quietly subsiding fury, the kind
that can be found anywhere. There is no language
for the way I have forgotten or remembered.
Only, whenever I think of death, her absence
becomes a sheath of wings disappearing into a dark body
of water, or a candle wick giving into its own weight
and slipping beneath a surface that will slowly harden,
maybe to be re-lit tomorrow night, adding its light
to the shadowy room of a cafe where a woman reads
aloud from a book she has written, poem after poem,
about love.