They exhumed my father’s uncle, and Joe’s older brother—my father’s father—my grandfather—had to identify the body.

We were in a restaurant when my father told me this.

“How long had he been buried?” I said. “Months,” he said. “Maybe a year.” I thought of the word decay.

These people, long dead, became yet more real.

It’s taken my whole lifetime to understand they’re real.

They say “never forget,” but you can’t remember things you haven’t experienced.

You can’t remember things you don’t know—but you can remember things you don’t know you know.

My best friend gave me a kimono with such deep creases that they never came out in the wash, no matter how many times I washed it.

It makes me think of a study I read about once that said butterflies “remember” being caterpillars.

I wonder what I don’t know I remember on the long, boring drive across New Mexico.

It’s a good kind of boring—the miles of dead nothing, and then a herd of tiny antelopes.

They make me think of Auden’s reindeer, moving silently and very fast in their altogether elsewhere.

There is the elsewhere in the poem, and the elsewhere of the poem—the deer are double elsewhere.

There is the past of the poem, a postwar poem, and the past in the poem, which is about the fall of Rome, which I never remember.

Maybe now I will remember.

Mirror, Mirror

Are you my golden shadow?

Mon semblable?

Blah blah blah?

We do the same things

Over and over in this life—life

The score of our normal minds.

The man in the fire

Didn’t recognize his wife.

Naked, shoeless, her mouth “almost black” . . .

We are like a surfer

On the surface of the sea, who cannot see

The whale underneath. We’re there for scale.

The fact refers

But the fact itself isn’t anything.

We are far from suffering.

Malice & the Unknown

One night, drunk at a party, William Burroughs suggested a round of William Tell.

His pretty young wife put a highball glass on her head. It may have had gin in it.

He shot her in the face, from six feet away.

Burroughs was a good shot—but also very drunk. And witnesses report he looked shocked by what he’d done.

But William and Joan had never played this game before.

We can never know if he meant to do it. We can never really know.

We can never, ever, ever, ever know.

This helps me think about infinity.

Increasingly, I do things to distract me from my thoughts.

The distraction helps my thinking.

It complicates my thoughts—it adds a mood, like background music.

It makes me interesting to myself.

I once heard someone say, That’s like drinking to remember, but I like drinking to remember.