The Blade of Nostalgia

by Chase Twichell

    When fed into the crude， imaginary

    machine we call the memory，

    the brain's hard pictures

    slide into the suggestive

    waters of the counterfeit.

    They come out glamorous and simplified，

    even the violent ones，

    even the ones that are snapshots of fear.

    Maybe those costumed，

    clung-to fragments are the first wedge

    nostalgia drives into our dreaming.

    Maybe our dreams are corrupted

    right from the start： the weight

    of apples in the blossoms overhead.

    Even the two thin reddish dogs

    nosing down the aisles of crippled trees，

    digging in the weak shade

    thrown by the first flowerers，

    snuffle in the blackened leaves

    for the scent of a dead year.

    Childhood， first love， first loss of love——

    the saying of their names

    brings an ache to the teeth

    like that of tears withheld.

    What must happen now

    is that the small funerals

    celebrated in the left-behind life

    for their black exotica， their high relief，

    their candles and withered wreaths，

    must be allowed to pass through

    into the sleeping world，

    there to be preserved and honored

    in the fullness and color of their forms，

    their past lives their coffins.

    Goodbye then to all innocent surprise

    at mortality's panache，

    and goodbye to the children fallen

    ahead of me into the slow whirlpool

    I conceal within myself， my death，

    into its snow-froth and the green-black

    muscle of its persuasion.

    The spirits of children

    must look like the spirits of animals，

    though in the adult human

    the vacancy left by the child

    probably darkens the surviving form.

    The apples drop their blossom-shadows

    onto the still-brown grass.

    Old selves， this is partly for you，

    there at the edge of the woods

    like a troop of boy soldiers.

    You can go on living with the blade

    of nostalgia in your hearts forever，

    my pale darlings. It changes nothing.

    Don't you recognize me？ I admit

    I too am almost invisible now， almost.

    Like everything else， I take on

    light and color from outside myself，

    but it is old light， old paint.

    The first shadows are supple ones，

    school of gray glimpses， insubstantial.

    In children， the quality of darkness

    changes inside the sleeping mouth，

    and the ghost of child-grime——

    that infinite smudge of no color——

    blows off into the afterlife