The Nebula of Memory
(a heptasyllabic)
She is not a girl I choose
to remember but I do.
She could blow smoke rings so round
they had the look of planets.
Not Earth or Venus or Mars —
she was always too distant —
but Saturn. A ring around
a ring around another.
Menthol is only for the
despondent she once whispered
and it sounded profound in some
way when she murmured it.
She fancied Gitanes or in
a pinch packs of Davidoffs
purchased in Switzerland. They
go better with Mateus, she
said, which we’d drink until two
on a bed that was a beach
we’d dreamt up that December.
We think differently at night.
She wasn’t the only one
in those days pretending that
she’d composed a passage that
Ferlinghetti had written
already but she was the
only one I knew also
doing exotic dances
in her underwear in the
dark when no one could see her.
Not even Ferlinghetti.
Love is never the province
of a few. Not in her case
anyway. She liked to quote
Jacques Rigaut and Jacques Vachet [the
two jocks she called them even
though they were rad French poets
not sportsmen. No one was called
a jock in those days save in
France, where Jacques were a franc a
dozen, or une douzaine she
mouthed to me in perfect French.
Life should be more transient
is another thing she said.
I should have taken notice
but saw no signs of things to
come, not then anyway.
No note, no phone off the hook,
no emptied bottle of pills —
just an alarm that went off
at ten-seventeen, a pack
of unopened cigarettes
and a glass of brandy that
I’m sure she planned to drain in
a single swig. Just like she
always did when I knew her.
• • •
s.d.s. is the pseudonym of a writer who has written five books as well as two chapbooks of visual poetry. The poetry, fiction, and non-fiction of s.d.s. have been published in, among others, the Guardian, Atlantic, New York Times, McSweeney’s, Sugar House, fleeting, Mobius, and Clapboard House, where s.d.s. won a short story prize.