Transcript

I’m Ada Limón and this is The Slowdown.

As you might have noticed, I am obsessed with memory. How it works. How it fails us. I hold on to the little details of my life as if they are essential to who I am. Just two days ago, our entire basement flooded. Surprisingly, we didn’t lose much. I said to my husband, “The thing is, we don’t have that much stuff.” To which he replied, “And now we have even less.”

The main thing I lost was every single hard copy of a magazine or newspaper I’ve ever had a poem published in. Honestly, I had just gathered them up neatly and put them in two big plastic bins and thought they’d be fine if the basement took on a little water. But then the sump pump broke while we were out of town and the basement didn’t take on a little water. It took on a lot of water.

The strange thing is, even as I tossed each slimy sodden periodical or magazine into the enormous trash bag, I found myself releasing them. When it comes down to it, I’m okay losing things. I’m not okay losing animals or people. That’s where I suffer. That’s where the memories become essential, elemental, the thing I never want to let go of. And yet we do. The memories of old friends or loved ones or people we’ve lost in our lives do eventually begin to fade.

I’ve never been able to determine if that fading is a way of protecting ourselves or if it’s just the brain becoming too overloaded with new information. Does the memory of the new tree replace the memory of the original tree? How can we be sure to hold on to the memories we are so determined to keep?

Today’s devastating but beautiful poem by the poet Michael Robins is a meditation on what it is to recall those very last moments you’ve shared with your partner. How in that memory of those moments — the tenderness, the conversation — there is something of a microcosm that forms. Everything that’s ever happened between you can exist in that small final moment. This poem is a record written down in the permanent ink of the heart.

The Remaining Facts
by Michael Robins

On the hour, the full, shuffled week since you said goodbye, I said
goodbye. A pillow in your lap &, six days later, the boarding pass in the 
pocket of your black sweatshirt. I remember touching your leg to wake
you &, if we erase the walls, you faced the ocean at the edge of the bed
waiting for your clothes. The torn nail from days ago (now nearly
healed) & my difficulty hooking your bra. Three, four steps outside &
I’ve been driving slower, like you asked, & letting go. Senseless
coincidence here in its rightful place & little more, not figurative nor
overblown yet we were waiting on one of many storms. Later, we left
the highway for a wooded drive & I learned the difference between
widow & widower. Then I kissed your head through a paper mask. 

"The Remaining Facts" by Michael Robins. Used by permission of the poet.