Memory Theater
The shade of my little lamp tints the air
blue and the air fills with a scent like eau
de vie and musk. Can’t find my shoes. Forget
them. Torn sheet? Forget that. The soft quilt drifts,
my cast-off reading glasses tilt sideways—
slippery sheet, blind glasses, orphan shoes:
a stage for drunken love though I’m sober.
My room—what is it? Waking memory
theater. That April when I wandered
lonely as nothing, it was never those
daffodils that blazed on my soul. It
wasn’t men, though I flirted with some. It
was fear like the trembling of joy. It was
me on that dream-silent, fence-bound street.
Miriam Levine is the author of Saving Daylight, her fifth collection of poetry. Another collection, The Dark Opens, was chosen by Mark Doty for the Autumn House Poetry Prize. Other books include Devotion, a memoir, and In Paterson, a novel. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, and Ploughshares. Levine, a fellow of the NEA and a grantee of the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, lives in Florida and New Hampshire. For more information about her work, please go to miriamlevine.com.