Remembering Brenda’s Misremembering While Listening to Suede Sing “Emily Remembers.”
In this tiny Cape Cod town, I listen to Suede as she creates crescendos and slides up and down the scales singing Emily Remembers Sending me sliding down my own deep toned riffs
Suddenly I am watching my wife the almost indiscernible look of confusion until her eyes clear what time is it? She wears shorts, flip flops I remind her to change into jeans and shoes before we go out in the snow Is it still winter or is it Spring? Last night’s snowfall forgotten I’ve taken to announcing the seasons on the refrigerator white board.
She is disappearing one story at a time. remembers things differently, creates a new story in place of the one that she’s lost. I remember with her as if we lived each moment in exactly that way.
These are her landmarks I do not erase them I leave the sagging roof, prop up the uneven porch. The crooked little house is what she wraps around herself every day.
Safe within the boundaries of bedroom, kitchen, dogs and cats, the tv shows she’s seen a hundred times.
All of this rushes back to me in one simple Song – Emily Remembers. You ask: What happens when she forgets “I will remember it for her.”
Awakening
Shelley Blue Grabel has been writing poetry since she learned to write. In 1975 Persephone Press published The Fourteenth Witch, a book of Shelley’s poems with photographs by Deborah Snow. In 2022, Broadkill River Press published a new collection of her work, Dowry Burnings. She has performed her poetry in NYC coffee houses, Philadelphia venues, Irish Eyes, Lewes Library, Rehoboth Writers Guild Night of Poetry and Song, Milton Poetry Fest and other local venues. She continues to develop her poetic style thanks to workshops and retreats sponsored by the Delaware Division of the Arts.