TRANSCRIPT

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

So often I find myself wanting to memorize a perfect moment so I can revisit it in my mind. I want to bottle the memory so I can sip on it later.

Writing is a way of memorizing moments. I know this. I do this. Because a poem can act as a portal, taking me back to a specific time and place. So often, mid-experience, I start to sense the poetic possibility of the moment. I find myself making a metaphor or grasping for imagery and descriptive language. I’m half living in the present, half processing this moment’s future on the page.

But sometimes I just want to sit and live the experience without trying to find language for it yet. Sometimes I just want to take a Polaroid or a tiny video with my senses only, cataloguing the way the sun filters down through the leaves, or the constellations of freckles on a loved one’s arm, or the way the water sounded lapping against the side of a boat. 

In those moments, I don’t reach for my pen and notebook. I don’t open the Notes app on my phone and start typing. I just sit still, watching and listening. Sometimes I admit what I’m doing. I’ll say it out loud to the person I’m with, if it’s someone I trust not to give me side eye when I say, “Let’s just sit here for a minute. I’m trying to memorize this moment so I don’t lose it.” 

It can be hard to remember a feeling, exactly. I can’t pull up pure happiness, but I can remember times when I was truly happy, or deeply feeling other emotions. I can recall the images, the sounds, the smells associated with those moments. A certain version of the sky at a certain time of year and time of day is stuck in my mind because of the experience it's associated with. And I’m grateful for that, because I want to find ways to remember these feelings. For myself, and for poems.

Today’s poem is a logbook of memories, not yet perfectly organized into a tidy narrative. It’s as if the speaker wants to remember it all exactly as it happened inside of their mind.

Surety
by Anna Zumbahlen

The dog buries her nose in the sand and there is an echo in my left ear, a 
pressure like fluid. I have been keeping an internal catalog of the light—in
the color on the mountain, in the sky, in the creosote and the primrose and
the sand. Cataloguing all the ways in which I have strained to be other than
I am, the ways I am not immediately legible to the people I love. That might
be a slip of intuition. Like tethering myself to the repetition of a word that I
know I don’t pronounce quite correctly. Something metrically off, a sliver of
shine beneath gravel, or dust gathered on a mirror. Things don’t
connect—they correspond,  he wrote, in quotation. And I did admire
accuracy. Granite sand with flecks of quartz. After our walk, the dog rolls
over and shows me her spotted belly, four paws lifted, and her mouth
relaxes open. Already April sends me to my knees.

"Surety" by Anna Zumbahlen. Used by permission of the poet.