Note

Angie Estes

They wrote to say they'd found my mother wondering

in the garage -- like entering the ethereal（天上的） sphere,

I thought: drawing near to its desire, so deeply

is our intellect immersed（专注） that memory

cannot follow after it, as if desire were a fugitive

dye made from the blue stars of the forget-me-

not and hell could be defined as that which cannot be

forgotten, the damned condemned to go on

like Paolo and Francesca in desire but unable to

recognize what could move them so

* * *

When I was a child, my mittens were attached

to each other, their cord running under

my coat from hand to hand like the blue

veins in the clear plastic Invisible

Man I assembled in the basement, and after

he left assisted living, my friend's father

kept asking, What if my mother dies

again? What, I thought, if she slips off

like a glove

* * *

In paradise,

Dante says, we will have only a memory

of having had a memory, now lost

like the photograph of my mother's great

grandfather printed from a negative made

from a photograph of a negative, which we

Xeroxed for keeps: it's the same old

story of the Perseids, their gray hair

streaking the sky the way ethereal

is streaked by real

* * *

Like denizens

of the cadenza（装饰乐段）, cicadas（蝉） scratching

their cicatrices（伤痕）, a star shines until day

begins to lighten the sky, the shining

gone though the star remains, not

shining but not yet gone, still

moving across the heavens right up

to the moment the sky turns

sky blue.