Sarah Clay

In church we make small work of memorizing,
lighting candles to memorialize a life lost.
Each object put to sleep against its will: double-decker buses, bunk beds…

Palms touching or turned upward as if to catch any cast-off relics that might return
to reclaim a kind of permanence in our waiting hands.
In church we make small work of memorizing.

Tape and videocassettes holding our first unsteady steps,
Non-multi-faceted phones, cars that refuse a certain hybridism.
Each object put to sleep against its will, double-decker buses, bunk beds…

When he was ten, my father would to go to the bank and trade in dollars for pennies,
asking for the wheaties, the indian heads — anything that had been born before him.
In church we make small work of memorizing.

Praying for penny collections, handwritten letters,
the bell-bottoms and shag haircuts, which sometimes crawl out of graves for a time until
each object put to sleep against its will, double-decker buses, bunk beds…

The newspaper is slated for erasure.  The pencil is also scheduled. And, my father tells
me what I’ve suspected all along about the dog was true. He didn’t travel to any heavenly
farm.
In church we make small work of memorizing
each object put to sleep against its will, double-decker buses, bunk beds…

 

Title from Brenda Hillman’s “Phone Booth,” Practical Water 2009

 

Sarah Clay grew up in St. Louis Park, MN.  She lives, writes, and works in Portland, OR, and is currently an MFA candidate in Minneapolis, MN, at Hamline University. Her work has appeared in Sleet Magazine.