Green Linden Press

Forgetting                                                                                              —Gary J. Whitehead


What she can’t remember comes apart
in me so that my heart confuses its rooms.

She irons, and the crease uncreases,
the steam hisses, her washed thoughts

call up ancient vacations—a Laundromat
in Maine, the four of us shivering naked

while the machines churned our grime,
the time we caught blue crabs on the Cape,

our trunks black with inlet mud. But
she can’t remember what she’s just said.

There’s a freshness to forgetfulness.
And when there is no more memory

everything will be clean and put away.
She pulls another shirt from the basket.

I wander the rooms where I grew,
rooms soon to be someone else’s.

I feel the embossed spines of old book sets,
their wrinkled titles, and one gilt cloth

holding a place in a story
one of us never quite saw to the end of.