on a clear day, you can see the ocean from here

what we don't want to know about each other lengthens the day, the accord of chewing in silence, the fear or merely concern that the crease in the ear half hidden by the turtle earring could forebode something deadly, a heart dropping with the force of a brick gathering speed from an overpass, which car beneath, is it aiming, does the pavement reach up saying take me, take me instead.

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befriending someone with the same name as a first love, working with one with the same name as a recent lover, now far away, some remnant of affection, a wild caring carrying over in echo but tactile, belly-level, new faces that turn at the noise of these old names, palimpsest: parchment on which the original writing has been effaced, and something else has been written. (Greek, palin, again; psao, I rub or erase.)

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the habit of photographing faces too close for clear focus, hodgepodge of snapshots in envelopes, not album-quality but to throw them away -- such superstition in ordinary gestures, here's Lynne before she shaved her head, here's that guy we stayed with in Dallas, here's another closeup of a gravestone in New Orleans, here's Peter out of focus dancing again at the bar, before chemo, before diagnosis, flash over focus, the memory of all our burials, what takes the iodine down what beds hold us now palimpsest: a landscape in which most of the topographic features are not related to the materials at the land surface but are inherited from a buried surface at depth. the crease in the ear only noticeable on an early morning resisting the alarm, the puddles icing over for the first time this season, the ubiquitous pigeons seeming to coo now, now, now.

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in spite of its cultural ridiculousness, it's easy to understand why white people choose Chinese characters as tattoos. we can only love what we know so much before it becomes sentiment, lost cause, an old mausoleum crumbling. we each know which is our best side, and try to give that to the camera / palimpsest: a block of memory that has been allocated, freed or reclaimed, and then allocated again. such memory may contain data from the previous use. if the palimpsest is scanned conservatively, such left-over data may cause unreachable objects to appear reachable. years after my grandmother's death, I borrow a pair of gloves from my mother's closet. too small for anyone else in the house, an inadvertent inheritance, leather, they are hers, and just when I needed them.

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