Bramer - The Refrigerator Memory

The Refrigerator Memory

Shannon Bramer

copyright Shannon Bramer, 2005

first edition

This epub edition published in 2010. Electronic ISBN 978 1 77056 190 8.

Published with the assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts
and the Ontario Arts Council. We also acknowledge the support of
the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing
Tax Credit Program and the Government of Canada through the
Book Publishing Industry Development Program.

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Bramer, Shannon
The refrigerator memory / Shannon Bramer.

Poems.

ISBN 1-55245-154-2

I. Title.

PS8553.R269R44 2005 C811.54 C2005-901258-7

This book is for David Derry
and our sparkly Sadie Glenn

You know your own difference.
Nicholas Gilbert Scott, age four

The girl says she is always hungry
but I suspect some other poverty
something cold and sad
in her packed lunch

Yes. Some secret with her silent
egg salad. Some dispute
with the tuna-fish sandwich
cut into terrible triangles. Even this
salted tomato is too large
and unhappy, heart-halved
and runny

with seeds

Her chocolate and raisins are no answer
Ive always hated hungry people

Will not attend your famished picnic
Will not unfold the checkered blanket

Geralds wife Tina is driving him crazy, keeps leaving
the table to cry. Shes up again curling her hair come midnight:
Fixing Thin Tina All Shadow No Sky.

Tinas got lonely and dying they say: Poor Gerald, Poor Love
in the olden-days way. Go out again, now, go out
for a walk Gerald feels for his coat and keys in the lock.

Tina had dresses and lipstick in red. Tinas in a ball
now, with the cat
on the bed.

On Saturday night I hid his prosthetic arm. He was drunk, it was easy; when he tried to run after me he stumbled, fell, hit his head on the corner of the coffee table. I was drunk too, sad, acting stupidly. Earlier that night he had been flirting with my sister and I felt neglected and negligible next to her in her pink sweater. I didnt like the way he kept touching her with his false limb; I didnt like the way she kept giggling at the strange feel of the plastic. I had paid for his prosthesis, after all, so perhaps this explains my possessiveness. When we got home we kept drinking. Before bed I started undressing him: his socks, his pants, his underwear, his sweater, his shirt, his arm. He came after me and fell. His forehead bled all over the carpet. I hid his arm in the basement. Dressed his wound. Put him to bed. Showered. Made tea. I read The Idiot deep into the night. My sister doesnt even know who Dostoyevsky is.

It was too bad about Love
who kept his nationality
secret, who never left the house
without his burnt red wig.

They accused him
of being greedy and perverse.
Of touching children
and stealing.

He was a tickler.
And I didnt like being tickled.

Still, it was wrong of the adults
to hurry him, wigless, out of town.
The way we children took to stoning
his car with hard candy.

Instead of church Sarah
goes to tanning salons.
Feeds on light. Stuffs herself
senseless says the Hairstylist.

O, you tug
at his wings,
tear them
away.
From his body:
gentle
child in yellow, see
him strange
as calligraphy, see
your naked
monarch twitch
with grief, black,
no, no
longer himself.

No wings, now
wish the dead
awake, wake
up! Early love
poems
pressed in a book.

O, you tug
at his wings,
tear them
away.

We share a small space, my son and I. That is why I always hear him. Abrupt, broken pieces of word punch themselves out of his tiny mouth as if he had no will; the words will themselves. He sleeps on his back, his hands in two fierce fists. Ive asked around but no one seems to know whether or not it is normal for a two-year-old to speak, with such determination, in his sleep.

He is young, the words are ordinary enough, often monosyllabic: tree, bus, cup, cut, bug, no, sky, rock, tree, bus, cup, cut, bug, no, sky. I have taken to recording the things I am able to discern. Sometimes he speaks sentences. Once he said: I need that. It shocked me to hear him speak so clearly, with such confidence. His small voice in the night sounds a hundred years old.

During the day he speaks so softly I can scarcely hear him. He responds to everyday questions carefully, flushed with embarrassment, as if he knew more about the words than he should. Living with him I have become both fearful and accustomed to a strange, intermittent kind of silence.

What is a young mother to do?

I have told him the plants in our apartment will grow stronger if he talks to them. Im sure they now know all of his secrets. He is patient and methodical, makes time for all nine of them, turns to the various leaves and flowers and listens in return. Their conversations make me envious. I have tried to hear what the plants have to say, but they remain solemn and tight-lipped with me. This amuses my little son, who quietly laughs at his silly mother kneeling before the fern and spider plants, hair tangled in leaves, trying so hard.

What it means to carry a camera
is to speak out of the empty
frame seeing God, Sky, Road, her return
and faith in the perfection of deserts.
To picture the quiet mans body in the city.
This is what it means to love, to loiter

In forbidden zones, allowing the girl to loiter
there with you, perhaps, taking your camera
away at intervals and sending you into the city
alone. Sometimes we need to come home empty
handed; sick with strange deserts
in mind we will leave and return

With our long memory of the city,
its sights and sounds to repeat and return
to the missing man in the room, his empty
chair. In his cool bed we loiter
in the dark, patient with the camera
and every sense recalling other deserts,

Other times like this when the idea of deserts
confounded us, when we dreamt the city
was made of sand, tugged that camera
down around his neck, no promise of return,
but something of you, hopeful, seemed to loiter
in the mind of the street, the empty

Bed to go back to, your empty
room a perfect void like his deserts,
the window open where you loiter
like a vagrant in your own apartment, the city
loose with lights, the slow lights of return.
You see he is unpacking the camera,

Cradling the camera, testing the empty

weight of its images, tiny doors of return, her

cold pictures of city, moon, desert.

In my thoughts and in my deeds in what I have done and in what I have failed to do. My lies like glass marbles are highly ornamental, they roll and chime, roll

and chime. They whistle, they breathe the sweet breath of muddy flowers despite the swollen down pillows (poor dead goosey) Ive used to stifle them.

Hes wrinkled in his suit.

Santa-like but mean-looking too, drunk