Cipher

(from The Suitcase Files)

Wrinkled and torn at one edge, a crimson bar napkin falls out of a notebook. His thick, black, capital letters stare back at me: CIPHER. I hear my father’s father saying to me, “I wonder if you’ll ever make something of yourself,” the deepening lines of his face tight with bitterness. Self. Cipher. A person or thing of no value or importance; a nonentity. Zero. I see Dad in the darkroom developing photos of highways for the Highway Department when he wanted to be back in Belfast photographing another generation’s riots. He was a man who preferred photographing Vietnam than reading a newspaper while waiting in long lines for gas. Was it this preference that ultimately killed him? Pages and pages of notes, unfinished stories, just begun stories, letters and lyrics are all I have left. I read them slowly, trying to decipher their coded messages, to unlock your remains—your words—to spell the unlived life that killed you.

Cipher. The word can spell a man—a man without meaning. Can mean a script in code. Can spell meanings that mean nothing—or words that hold such value they can’t be written plainly. Meaning camouflaged within letters. Words that mean nothing. Words that are dangerous. Secrets of no importance. Secrets more necessary than truth. Truths that threaten a life and every life that life touches. The word is weightless in my hand. Is the possibility of no meaning, meaninglessness, the worst possible truth of all? Your square letters bleed into the red napkin as if your hand was pressing too hard.

The Secret Life of Memory

 

After five and a half centuries
of turning to you in darkness,

smelling your fine, clean hair, and clicking
your nipple rings between my teeth,
the reverberating sweetness
echoes in my sinus spaces—a universe

of sound born from fragile bone.
I still hear it (as in a pool
underwater, metals clinking somewhere

in the depths) yet only a tiny bell chimed,
a doll’s toy, barely
audible within these walls—

while our violent silence swells
a new century
and the neighbors quietly say nothing.

 

(Thanks to Kate & Amy. This is still in progress so any thoughts…)