Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

A colleague entered as I was trying to write the episode you’re listening to. She announced, This has been sitting in my office for a month. Ceremoniously, she laid my trench coat, pinched between her fingers like an old dishcloth, on the rear of a nearby chair by a bookshelf. Ah, there it is, I said to her turning back.

I’ve a horrible habit, lately, of leaving my personal items behind me in rooms, restaurants, and store counters, where I’m often called back by a cashier. The other day I walked away from my phone at a grocery store checkout line.

I want to believe I am materially shedding myself of the physical plane and achieving some transcendence of spirit. At least, that’s what I’ve been telling my family. Yet, I am looked on with pity as I run around the house asking, if anyone has seen my glasses, my running shoes, my office keys, my gloves, my . . . my . . .

Truth is: I do not mind misplacing items. But friends I love and cherished landscapes are proving harder to retrieve from the forefront of my mind. Let me not misrepresent; I’m not suffering a crisis; I’m just suddenly aware the world is receding. And I want to hold it close as long as possible.

Today’s poem, an homage to poet Robert Hass, suggests one possible way of retaining is to live in the music of our existence, where memories though fleeting and at our peripheries, still carry indulgences of delight.

Morning in a City
by J. Mae Barizo

The dilemma always, is forgetting: the notion 
that details cancel out the affect of a moment, beauty

concealed by particularities. Haydn sonatas played by
Pogorelich, for example, or the deep indigo of a certain

shirt. That the pianist’s exaggerated bass notes and shifts
in tempi, the existence of such music in a room with

crooked walls is a departure from a world one cannot
give birth to, a room of undiluted sun. Or the sentiment

that overindulgence is a signal of tastelessness in Haydn
but not in Ravel. Because there is no one thing where

emotion corresponds in the same fashion as it does with 
another. Just as there is no fixed reaction to this Adagio or 

to the sound of the word Dornauszieher when it is whispered:
one who extracts thorns. I thought about this in the early morning

as the voice of my friend diminuendoed, sparse sentences
and all the while the underlying ostinato of desire. The sky

lightening to lavender and my memory faltering: Las Rocas,
mimosa tree, a cloud-hung sky. Longing because it is so full

of passing places. You are so forgettable my restless—your silly
mispronunciations, your hand slicing melon, that painting

that you love. Such tenderness, those sunrises with your hand at my
rib cage, our longing like a famine in a green country; my childhood

sonatas, limestone quarries I used to swim in where I caught crayfish
with my bare hands, the lilacs and their thousand petal tongues.

“Morning in a City" by J. Mae Barizo from TENDER MACHINES © 2023 J. Mae Barizo. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Tupelo Press.