The Alan Sondheim Mail Archive

from eyebeam: http://eyebeam.org/blogs/alansondheim/


memorial for my father, third day


the emptied house which is never empty
the scars sleeping for decades,
of literacy and legibility, i read
everything into signs, signs swallowed
signs, and

everything contained, was contained
mold and seepage made breathing difficult
the house lay in low iambic

the house flexed with flood and mining
with repairs curled round itself,
and so emptied, this annihilation will
never return, hurtful sensibilities
of fossils where sleeping and crawling down,
stairs returning and inscribing motion
which would be the telling of it, the framing,
some might say the last of it, some might say
framing unlasts

http://www.alansondheim.org/memorial2.mp4

all at eyebeam: http://eyebeam.org/blogs/alansondheim/
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memorial for my father, day four*

sleep lock leave

http://www.alansondheim.org/memorial239.jpg
http://www.alansondheim.org/memorial246.jpg

the house locking out, locking up,
memorials leave imprints like fossils.
1.shadows of the bed where i slept in my childhood,
2.shadow of the table at the corner of the bed:
the green table where i kept a photograph
of a hydrogen explosion,
of one of the eisenhowers,
of a united nations diplomat.

leaving, last words spoken.
i could walk this house with my eyes closed.
what's left is the phenomenology of space
and its corners eaten by mold.
untoward cocoons ravage the phenomenology.

mold corrals health, circumscribes breath.
and the woozy head can't think this phenomenology.

--

* the last day, when memory ends.
we retreat from the ashes like leaving a village in germany.
we have our names there under erasure. we call ourselves
annihilation.