Of Mneme

All winter’s dusk and murk I spent hard at work 
     against myself, depression’s demon a contagion

I caught in dream,
     crouched on my chest. Thus lust-

less and languorous, brain
     in a jar and ocular nerve, I went out of the world

and wandered around with the shades in hell. What could I eat
     then but the strange cupboard I’d amassed: salt-preserved turnips

cut in cubes, Finnish herring-licorice, loquats
     canned and swimming in their syrup, the cat (I sassed)

if she’d come close enough: an emergency
     meal in disaster’s season. As a girl, barely three,

I’d asked my mother if she’d kill a cat
     for me, so I could know how its body worked,

as I’d seen her do with the goats we raised
     for meat. In childhood, life was not precious

so much as there, yard teeming
     with daffodils, tadpole eggs a bouquet of eyes

peeping from the pond scum—amphibian Argus Panoptes 
     in infancy, or so it seemed

to me. Life flourished or fled, its wont
     as often as it stuck around. Of twenty kittens

born under the steps each spring, one 
     would fall in the well and taint the tap

water with rot’s smell; two would get eaten 
     by a possum; and the deranged mackerel-

patterned cat I named Natalie, after a girl I admired 
     but didn’t understand, gave birth to five, eyes

slicked shut as if reminder that the body is left
     to decide for itself the first week, if nothing else

does it first. Sure enough, Natalie had eaten
     the litter alive an hour later. Indoors, at the top

of the stairs lit by an Edison bulb, a daguerreotype 
     of my great-aunt Kathryn—done in pencil,

I learned, when I was tall enough to look
     more carefully, drawn by a traveling artist who’d roamed the countryside

a hundred years before—turned insect- 
     eaten, its colony of silverfish shivering

with graphite’s ghost inside the glass. The body 
     of a cat is not so unlike a snake’s, all ribs

and tail, and the snake the thing we knew
     to fear the most. I don’t mean Eden, another ancestral

loss; water moccasins lived in the creek’s root- 
     dark shallows, or laced their left-behind skin

through the outhouse rafters. One bit
     our only good guard dog, a teacup Chihuahua

my sister named Precious in the month
     it belonged to her. She was always finding

and discarding animals, clothes, chaw-spitting 
     boyfriends; left to this new home, Precious led a pack

of Great Pyrenees that each weighed more
     than me, and they prowled the perimeter, moon-

lit luminously white through the tall grass, each 
     following its littermates like a train of ghosts. Bit,

Precious ran yelping up from the creek, thimble- 
     heart pumping poison, and fell dead at my mother’s

feet. A long time before all this—I must’ve been four 
     by then—and up to her forearms in soap-

suds, my mother told me, Miriam, I think I can kill a cat 
     for you. She’d thought a year about it, had finally

roused the courage. Oh, I don’t care about that anymore,
     I told her, blasé as any amoral child who’s forgotten

her murderous nature in a moment
     of distraction. Visiting my student in the hospital

last fall, I asked whether she’d felt the weather 
     in her mind shift after six sessions

of ECT. No, she told me, and she was no more 
     forgetful than before. Adulthood begins

as early as forgetting does, but does forgetting 
     begin with hurt we cannot categorize? It casts

its fumigator’s fog over everything. One Passover
     eve, one of the goats slipped her pen for the verdant

yard, lingered in its tangles eating spider- 
     wort, mouthing the frilly heads of shade-

dappled daffodils that bloomed in neat rows, planted
     by the long-dead aunts who’d been born in our house

and died there too; like Eurydice, how could she 
     have known what awaited her in the wild

grasses, of the narcissus’s cyanide sap? Beneath 
     the butchering frame where her sons had hung

from their back legs and bled out into a black bucket, 
     my father funneled mineral oil down her throat,

a poor emetic but even if it hadn’t been, already 
     death was strolling through the mesquite

thicket, thinking nothing of its thorns. I once
     named my mother’s favorite milk cow Eurydice. Seventeen

then, I was old enough to understand metaphor 
     turns literal if you let it, too young

to call it a different thing than magic; I’ll let you imagine 
     how the story ends, and rural life’s thousand

more: The llama that joined my brother’s herd of cows 
     for a week, the neighbor boy who had an aneurysm

at ten. A tornado took roofs off half the houses 
     here, once, long enough ago that no one thinks

of it anymore, except in prayer. We were foreigners
     once, but this, too, we’ve forgotten. Last winter when derangement

sat squatting on my spirit, my body useless as a machine 
     missing half its gears, I lay in bed, and all I had was gold

leaf I’d bought in an alleyway across the world where gold- 
     beaters in loincloths, three to a workshop, pounded

with wooden mallets a syncopated sound that drew 
     together and apart sinuous as a snake, and I pasted it

on my skin until I glowed like a minor god
     in her temple, surrounded by her holy clutter

of brackish pickle jars and popcorn
     made with aniseed butter, and I wondered if the darkness

in my mind would lift, and what of memory 
     I’d find left.

Read more from Issue 16.2.