How Memory Works

~Matthew Roth One giant slab of morning light crashes down the narrow street like a whale struck in a shipping lane. The scientists come wearing rubber gloves and hip waders. They heave it onto the sidewalk and have at it with their dull gray instruments. Soon, its organs are spilled across the ground like Gettysburg's dead. They slice open the stomach and find everything the light consumed: the white tablecloth bruised with wine, the two a.m. feeding, the knife and the gun, brown nut of sleep cracked open, bowed heads of flowers, still fragrant, asleep in their beds. By the time I arrive almost nothing is left. Every article of interest has been carted away to far-off labs for further study. So I go, without thinking even to touch its dim remainders, lying there on the concrete like twilight— not thinking until now, two weeks hence, standing here in the pre-dawn rain, I look down and spy something glinting off my black boots like a tiny flower of daylight, which it is. ~~~~~ Next