TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

It’s such a strange and dreamlike thing, the memory. Strange and dreamlike in the way it operates — what it picks up and what it leaves lying there, what it holds onto and what it eventually lets go of. I don’t know why I remember the dress I wore on my eighth birthday (ruffled and beige with tiny blue flowers) while entire important conversations I had in adulthood have slipped away from me. I don’t understand the sorting the mind does, and how it decides what to put in the keep pile and what put in the pile labeled give away.

I don’t understand it, but I’m so intrigued by it. I love when I’m someplace and I’m reminded of someplace else. In those moments, it’s like my brain is tapping me on the shoulder, trying to get me to make a connection: Hey, remember that time when…?

It might be the quality of the light, or a smell, or a sound. Or even the sky can be a reminder. For example, whenever the sky is very clear and very blue, I can’t help but think of the morning of September 11th. Maybe you know what I mean. “Hard blue,” some people called it. Meteorologists often describe that deep, intense blue sky as "severe clear.” What a phrase, given the tragedy that unfolded in the air that day.

There’s an art installation at the 9/11 Memorial Museum called “Trying to Remember the Color of the Sky on That September Morning.” The large installation by Spencer Finch is 2,983 watercolors, each a shade of blue. The Museum has called Finch’s artwork “a tribute to the enormity of collective loss and the individuality of each of those who were taken from us far too soon.”

I admire how today’s poem is as much about memory — and the connections our minds make — as it is about loss.

Terra Vita
by Lisa Hiton

My mother kneeling
next to the hibiscus
with a little hand shovel
planting hyacinths
when I came to watch her.

I must have been seven or eight,
wide-eyed at the vague thing
flopping in her hand.
She reached in, fumbled 
through the soil. When she found

the other half of the worm
she placed it at the base of a flower
to show me that it was still alive,
that both halves were working
on their own, wriggling

back to their underground world
to be useful:

It’s gorgeous in Boston today,
everyone is outside sunbathing
just like that day with the worm

and I know I had a dream about you
again. Or maybe it was your dream
and I was conjured to dwell there

so you wouldn’t be alone. Why
I anticipate forgetting the clouds
today, their shapes, how lifelike

they are when they drift…why
I remember the worm…
it has something to do with skin

and pink smokestacks. My palms
red before callusing
after working at a steer,
or dragging a heavy load…

Oh God, you hath given me two hands
but only one heart.

"Terra Vita" by Lisa Hiton from AFTERFEAST © 2021 Lisa Hiton. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Tupelo Press.