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Analeptic Lodestone: Memory Magnet

August Smith

It’s like a magnet attracting a magnet of the same substance:
There’s a shirt I wear that’s so close
to the shirt my father was wearing
in the picture I lost
of him holding me as an infant.
How quick the inscription of a camera!
Within an eyeblink’s time its shuttering captured a latent image,
and when light fell on silver halide emulsion in just such a way,
it formed this picture, center of a crystal lattice
of memories bound each to each by covalent bonding.
It was the only picture I had of my father and his metonymic shirt:
black with silver-paisley
amoebas:
(Cascadilla erosion-engines twin-falling:
suspended waterfalls, or pairs of tears).
Today is one of those days
I feel closer to him,
and I move just like my father did:
tuniced in black and silver-paisley.

$20 on the dresser, sunglasses,
sunlight on mahogany,
Terrier teeth
fixed in the puncture holes of father’s forearm,
curses thick-forming
in his embouchure
(he sure played a mean trumpet according to Mom)—
he threw the dog against the wall,
agitated more by surprise than by anger.
Mom jumped up and got him a washcloth, pronto,
held it while Billie Holiday’s voice swaddled our family trinity.
I was four years old, and that’s the only memory I have
of my father—within months Mom moved downstate
and though I never saw him again,
and the picture is no more,
my memento shirt is the only material covalent extant,
all others in this magnet-chain are mnemonic:
and at the heart, somewhere in there, is my father.

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