Memories in exile.
There is a moment, almost too slight for the heart to notice, when remembrance
ceases to belong to the one who remembers.
Before it is spoken, it is enclosed as a shell encloses the sea:
its silence carries the warmth of the hand that has guarded it,
its contours have been worn by one life alone,
its fragrance has not yet consented to the air.
But language is not a cabinet.
It is weather.
The instant a memory passes the threshold of the lips,
it abandons the singular chamber in which it believed itself secure.
Its colors loosen.
Its edges become hospitable.
The voice that uttered it can no longer recall
whether it has given something away
or merely uncovered what was never entirely its own.
For memory, perhaps, has always desired exile.
It rises like the invisible pollen of an orchard
whose blossoms no eye has counted.
It ascends beyond the roofs of solitary consciousness,
into a region where forgotten afternoons,
the salt upon a grandmother’s sleeve,
the hesitation before a first confession,
the shadow of rain crossing a childhood window,
and the nameless grief of strangers
recognize one another without introduction.
There they mingle with astonishing courtesy.
One remembrance lends its twilight to another’s spring.
A scent borrows the shape of a face.
A farewell discovers it has long been preparing
the arrival of someone not yet met.
Nothing remains faithful to chronology,
yet everything becomes more deeply true.
Perhaps heaven, if it concerns itself with earthly things,
is composed less of souls than of these liberated recollections,
released from ownership,
patiently dissolving the boundaries
that our names, our histories, and our frail certainties
mistook for permanence.
And somewhere beneath that immeasurable atmosphere,
a child pauses before the fragrance of warm bread,
or a woman hears footsteps in an unfamiliar city,
or an old man lifts his eyes at the exact angle of evening light,
believing the feeling to be entirely his own.
He cannot know
that what trembles within him
may once have belonged to another mouth,
another century, or
another tenderness.
For memories, once spoken,
are no longer possessions.
They become climate.
And from that vast and invisible weather
the future gathers its impossible seeds,
fashioning from the abandoned harvests of countless lives
those moments which, when they finally arrive,
they will seem—as every true memory has always seemed—
both utterly new
and mysteriously remembered.
— Adam Donaldson Powell
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