Untitled ("Remember the sky your angel")

A memory poem that lets cinema, family mythology, and fractured time gather around a vanished intimacy.

A memory-poem that opens with twinned imperatives - 'Remember the sky your angel / walked across' and 'Remember how skin droped / into your lab' - and insists that only 'tall trees / and things like that' could 'know that we / were real'. It then swerves into family-and-film mythology: a 'William Faulkner Aunt' linking 'improvisional' to 'Marlon / Brando', the command to 'Watch him stay alive', and a closing dislocation where the speaker is 'many places at the same time' while 'he he is definately only / at one'.

The poem is built on the strain of asking someone to remember what may never have been witnessed - the proof of reality outsourced to trees, as if human memory alone could not hold it. The Faulkner aunt and Brando are not name-dropping so much as a private theory of survival: improvisation is how 'he' is told to 'stay alive', performance as endurance 'in their theatre'. The final contrast is the real ache - the speaker scattered across places and stalled seasons ('I have not seen seasons'), while the beloved is pinned to a single location. That asymmetry, one person diffuse and the other fixed 'only / at one', is the vanished intimacy the opening 'Remember' was trying to reach, and the stutter 'he he' lets the line catch on him.