cynthia loves poetry

Memory isn’t linear. It doesn’t flow smoothly from one moment to the next like words in a textbook. Instead, it comes in fragments—bright shards of recollection mixed with shadows of uncertainty, questions that may never find their answers.

Poetry understands this. Where prose might struggle to capture memory’s strange movements, poetry sometimes reflects the way our minds skip between moments, between certainties and doubts. In “The Old Woman’s Lament,” these fragments become lettered on the page:

     Tomorrow I must go out but I can’t remember why. Or where.
     Did I make a list? The list would tell me what I have to do, but if
     I have made a list; then where would the list be?

Notice how the questioning loops back on itself, how uncertainty becomes parenthetical—as if even the doubt needs its own separate space. This is how memory actually works: we circle around what we can't quite grasp, we question, we second-guess ourselves.

     What happened to them all? 
     What happened to my people—where did they go?
     I can’t remember.
     (I don’t know if I want to remember)

The Shape of Forgetting
Sometimes memory takes the form of lists—as if by cataloging what we've lost, we might somehow hold onto it:

     There was something about a gun, and his van
     at Lincoln Park on that rainy morning in 1974
     (but I don't remember for sure)

The specificity here—Lincoln Park, 1974—stands in sharp contrast to the uncertainty. We remember the details but can't trust their arrangement, like pieces of a puzzle that won't quite fit together.

Sweet Uncertainties
But not all forgotten things carry darkness. Sometimes what we've lost has edges tinged with sweetness:

     Maybe tomorrow is the day to visit Miss Mandy.
     We might make hollyhock princesses to float in a teacup
     and perhaps pick raspberries
     from her backyard bushes.

These memories glow with possibility—"might," "perhaps," "maybe." The uncertainty here isn't about trauma or loss but about the natural fading of time, like an old photograph slowly losing its clarity but keeping its warmth.

The Questions We Can't Answer
Throughout the poem, questions emerge and repeat:

     What was her name? Susan? No, not Susan.
     Was it Cherie?

These aren't just rhetorical devices. They're the mind's actual movement as it tries to grasp what's slipping away. Poetry can capture this process in a way that straight narrative cannot—the starts and stops, the false begins, the moments of recognition followed by doubt.

When Memory Becomes Music
The rhythm of remembering has its own music. Notice how the lines shift between long and short, between certainty and question:

     I remember lovely days, hot sun and dyed-emerald grass
     of midsummer—golden autumn when we danced
     among gilded birches
     through reddened maples
     along the banks of Whitney Creek, amidst swirling spinning leaves
    painted with amber & scarlet & gold

Here, memory becomes incantatory—as if by naming the colors, the places, the movements, we might somehow conjure back what's been lost.

The List That Never Was
The poem ends where it begins—with loss and uncertainty:

     I'm never going to find that fucking list.
     Where are my people, where is my tribe?
     Where did they go?

But there's something powerful in this circular return. The poem itself becomes a kind of list—not the one the speaker has lost, but a new one: a catalog of what remains when memory begins to fade, what stays with us even when we can't quite trust our own recollections.

In shaping verse about memory's fragmentation, we forge coherence from chaos. We make art from uncertainty. We transform our questions into their own kind of answer.

Poetry doesn't promise to recover what's lost. Instead, it offers us a way to hold both remembering and forgetting, certainty and doubt, loss and discovery. It gives shape to the shapeless nature of memory, turns fragments into form, makes music from the questions we can't answer.