More and more I resemble
the woman turned stela,
whom I imagine standing
like a solitary cactus
at the edge of the desert.

By now I too have become
a storage tower of memory,
that salty substance not absorbed
or sloughed off by the body.

Like her, I was rescued
(who knows why) for survival
and looked back at the destruction
of the place I had come from,
stunned by history’s genius
for punishing the guiltless.

Surely not all of her people were wicked.
Perhaps the ones who loved her
and whom she loved
were gentle, like my people,
whom I reprieve from their deaths
each time I remember my life
among them, my grandparents,
three guardian angels.
                                   *
As a child I played
with Japanese paper flowers.
In the package they were
tiny, shriveled bits of confetti,
nearly weightless,
but when they were put in a bowl of water
they sprang open, transformed
into a splurge of lotus flowers,
amazing yellow, orchid, rose.   

It’s like that when I think of them,
when I give them back brilliant moments
of family happiness
in random sunlit spaces.
The show is not for them.
It is for me: I set it up
so I can change the ending,
stop it short of hell,
give them a bearable old age,
a decent death. It doesn’t work;
it hasn’t worked all these years;
history has taken nothing back.
                                   *
Memory is the only
afterlife I can understand,
and when it’s gone, they’re gone.
Soon I will betray them,
Think of it as the solid pillar
dissolving. all that salt
seeping back into the sea.