The Way It Was
I kiss the dog-eared pages of your existence, knowing
it wasn’t you who made the folds.
It wasn’t the Raffi look-alike
who traded Oriental accordion fans for old cassette tapes
in the attic of his uptown apartment building,
nor was it the fruit vendor who sold papayas and mangoes
outside my grandmother’s window
or the nanny who made crustless peanut butter and honey sandwiches
and rain sticks out of the insides of paper towel rolls,
listening to Bantu dance music,
or the person you fell in love with on a Wednesday afternoon
before a pink and green laser show, your bodies touching
like it was a coincidence,
or the solitary log in the fire, peacefully disintegrating,
willfully and voluntarily, only minutes before the sunrise,
or the absence of clocks and calendars,
the destruction of that creeping Charlie,
the hierarchy of moments.
| Lauren Elizabeth Raheja |
|
levelheaded: The Way It Was
We hardly need to point out that this is a poem about memory. But the big, clear trick in this poem lies in the gap between the poem and its title. The body of the poem gives us the opposite of what the title promises. Instead of learning “The Way It Was,” we’re told over and over the way it “wasn’t.” We get a series of what we might call “un-memories.”
These “un-memories” are really weird because we don’t know if they actually happened and just miss the mark when it comes to describing “the way it was,” or if they are complete fabrications. Either way, while they vary in substance and detail, they mostly sell us the speaker’s nostalgia. When she gives us “the fruit vendor who sold papayas and mangoes / outside my grandmother’s window,” we’re sold a quaint scene from the old world (wherever and whenever that may be – ambiguity is part of the point). When she gives us “a Raffi look-alike” or “rain sticks out of the insides of paper towel rolls, / listening to Bantu dance music,” she traffics in a collective memory of late-twentieth century multicultural education and elementary school arts-and-crafts. And the “pink and green laser show,” feels like the love-at-first-sight, meet-cute moment from any of a million rom-coms. It’s built with a substance we recognize as “romance.”
This is to say, many of her “un-memories” feel familiar. And this is precisely why it’s the way it “wasn’t.” By the end of the poem, the speaker is desperate for something for something that describes the way it was. The “un-memories” have dissolved into images and abstractions like a burning log, or the “absence of clocks and calendars.” Or they’ve disappeared behind private memories like “the destruction of that creeping Charlie.” We could read the poem as a warning: do not trust your own memories of how it “was” because you and your memories are at the mercy of the world around you.
In the context of these “un-memories,” the “dog-eared pages of your existence” is really nice metaphor for “memories” because it implies there are many more pages of existence that are not dog-eared. Maybe the way it “was” can only be found in those grey areas between what the speaker remembers. Probably, the way it “was” has largely been forgotten. By listing some of the ways it “wasn’t,” the speaker gets us as close as possible to everything that’s lost.
-The Editors
