So many elements in James Brasfield’s poem “The Cypresses” speak to process, including memory, attentive observation, and mentorship. There are father and son at different stages of life sharing a particular fleeting moment that will become a different memory for each of them, and yet memory, if not the moment, persists. There’s the wonderful question the Russian émigré poet Joseph Brodsky asks: “What memory do we have / if we are afraid of it being altered”? That suggests a fluid or liminal state where present and past interact with each other, and memories may change as we change, as context adjusts the lens.
The poem “Hand,” with its epigraph from Hannah Arendt, begins in a liminal state of waking from dreams, then turns to focus on present specificities—a watch band, the thread wound through a button. But not just this present moment, there is also “the-what-was,” both recent and distant past, and all of it the process, the ongoing way the past (remembered and forgotten) continues to roll through us.
James Brasfield’s third book of poems, Cove, was published by Louisiana State University Press in 2023. He lives in Belfast, Maine.
—Betsy Sholl, Maine Arts Journal Poetry Editor
The Cypresses
for my son
The spring
your term ended in Italy
and my summer parole from teaching began,
the ferryman punched our tickets
for the waterbus to San Michele,
Brodsky’s last stop beneath the cypresses.
You added three pebbles
atop his headstone. I placed
a pen in the small, plastic bucket
beside his grave. It was
our experience, its roots from my past,
now of your life and always
a first and last time.
He would pause beside
a blackboard the length of a wall,
his stick of chalk held like a ciggy,
wince, pressing a hand to his heart,
as it hovered there . . . midterm,
October rustling the oaks
in Riverside Park . . . till he caught
his stream of thought about Frost
expressing some dissatisfaction
about himself, or some guilt,—
“memory his process,” Joseph said.
He asked us,
“What memory do we have
if we are afraid of it being altered,”
as the day eased into the past
as nothing more than breath exhaled
among the hovering currents of air.
Williamson Brasfield, photograph.
Hand
Is it more myself than I am?
—Hannah Arendt
Waking, I’ll allow what I remember
from a dream and hold only for a time,
though nothing will be lost
in dawn’s brightening transparency,
and how much has been displaced
already, I don’t remember.
I sense familiarity in what I see
and the-what-I-feel that’s newly seen—
the watchband now on my wrist,
stitches round the buttonhole on my sleeve,
a thread wound through the button,
and separate, unsewn to what I see:
my hand as not my own. I think
of what might be and the-what-was
not long ago and the far back, their portion
of what’s forgotten, all part
of what I see and feel I know.
Image at top: Williamson Brasfield, photograph.