Notation’s just part of the story,
I know
but it matters
if you carved the heart/arrow/name before
the first kiss or soon after
if you kissed her or she kissed you
either way
a hasty abbreviation—
the leaf-carpet crackled, footsteps
coming this way
•
Later, erasure—
crossed out in a flash, love
scraped away fast
And you, hiding behind afterthought’s
unembarrassed grin
you tried to annotate time
•
My fingertips
trace knots and grain for old
etched names
How many hours I watched 8mm film
jitter on the screen,
pored among the strangers
for a face
•
Just part of the story
notched on the weeping beech
like a child’s height on a doorframe
part of
yet a complete notation
•
A jotted note, a declaration:
The right to declare
The right to carve bias into permanence,
to exact bias from bark’s
hefty limb
The right to arrive at the other side
and not sing or play flute
The right to initial
on an aged elephant’s Samsonite hide
a name—mine
before the relic of me
disappears, before you X-out
you and me
before you rub out me
Now, the timing:
stop-gap, the need to notate
temporary as water, meat, heat
stop-gap, the need to state
I’m here
•
An old beech clothed in inconspicuous
yellow-green flowers
mutes its botanical laughter
but don’t miss
she is this moment my first love
exposed to yet another
withering winter
Don’t miss mark our kiss
and Ida, three letters
chiseled so deep the beech bled sap
On pachyderm trunk and feet, too,
inane déjà vu
in print, script, scrawl—
We were
here
Denise Bergman is the author of five poetry books: The Shape of the Keyhole (2021), Three Hands None, A Woman in Pieces Crossed a Sea, The Telling, and Seeing Annie Sullivan. All are book-length poems. She edited City River of Voices, an anthology of urban poetry.
