How will she be remembered? Solemn and clever? Or smart with her big books and stories, piling rusty sentences into corrugated boxes and stacking, stacking, stacking them, constructing a history as big and persuasive as she can.
Was she entertaining? Or was she tiresome with the melancholy, the going dark, the glum and repetitive hitting of the lightswitches. There! The lights are on and every flaw is presented in ivory bas-relief. Scrutinize her and feel free to give opinions, suggestions, corrections. She’ll accept them all, wholesale. Then her hand toggles the lever that shuts off all the glowing stars, and you are sunk into the pitch once again. Do you remember that? What about the blasted background sound she made, the incessant and uncomfortable drumming called insecurity.
Do not do that. Do not remember her that way, the summons of her memory bearing itself in metered time, no spangles and no frothy laughter. She’s gone swimming in a bath that is illuminated from the bottom up. The paintings are brighter, and the tastes are sweeter. Confidence took her hand and kissed her inside the soul, where it counts. This near-November, there aren’t tears and wrung-out hands, tortured poems and missives shredded through cut glass: there is only lovely loveliness, love, the thing poets for centuries have grasped and clung to. Love. Listen to that. Look at that!
Remember that.
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mary june brown 