Elizabeth Gargano
screen memory: a composite memory of events
experienced over and over
You are smaller than you can now imagine,
your head just reaching the scrolled arm of the couch,
slick white brocade, pierced with metal studs
drilled in mahogany. The couch looms in this cramped
apartment of early marriage, still called the "barracks"
after departed soldiers. After the war, your father's gone
all day. Your mother greets him like a hero
with coffee and kisses afternoons at five.
She picked up the couch cheap at an all-day auction.
It was meant as a symbol of the home to come,
comfortable, heavy, a destination possible to anyone.
On the faded brocade, tiny gold trees, apple trees,
hold out fertile branches, straining to touch.
The couch is high and padded. You can hide behind it,
easily, though you have no need to hide,
being unseen. Your sister and mother are screaming,
not for or about anything, but in the pure harmony
of certainty, in the arms of the scream itself.
At eight, your sister is already beautiful,
her skin ivory. Her hair burns red.
The way she gives herself to the scream
is a dance, her spine still, arms swaying
head working high, then low like a piston,
the stamp of her feet like the stamp
of your mother's feet. What strikes you
is their great love for each other.
And though you are too young to understand
how you will watch this scene over and over
for the twenty years it will take to leave home,
how rage will be their secret language,
one you will never learn to translate,
you'd like to dance too. You shuffle your feet
in a fake two-step of solidarity, but some fear
stops you because this dance, this love, is perilous.
Some movement of the air can burn you as it burns
your sister, her white cheek scalded by more than a slap,
by the pulse of her own young hatred and love.
To be beautiful might mean to be burned, and so
after your sister is sent to one bedroom,
and your mother lies down again, locked
in the other, you sit on the couch.
You can't believe the silence
that blows in now like a hot desert wind
across stillness and emptiness,
across this field of a thousand harvests,
this orchard, white and gold.
Copyright © 1996 by Elizabeth Gargano
Elizabeth Gargano's poetry has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Sing Heavenly Muse!, Northeast Journal, Poem, Pigeon Creek Poets,and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.She was one of the winners of the 1996 poetry contest sponsored by Borders Books and Music and WYEP 91.3FM. She has published fiction in Iris, The Willow Review,andThe Long Story. Her story, "Safe Hands," received The Willow Review's annual prize for the best short story published in the magazine in 1993. She has designed two book covers for White Eagle Coffee Store Press. She is a current recipient of a poetry writing fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.