Unassailable: Reiko's Poem

My friend, Reiko, a novelist and memoirist, lost her mother too recently, and every day when I wake up, I think of her.  Today I remember this poem I wrote for Reiko years ago.  Both of us, then and now, undone and remade by the desire to remember.

Unassailable

From where we stood, on the castle rock

Of Central Park, Harlem was as near as

Twenty years ago.  Everything

Between then and us was green.

The pond turtles were stacked up like stones

On stones.  The trees were a day away

From shucking their own shells.

The red wing of a black bird was like a hand

That had been dealt, and we were the splendor

Sight we had given ourselves.

Afterward, it was Amsterdam to Broadway,

Columbus Circle down to the sweet

Remembered squalor of Times Square,

And on every corner:  Song.

The high hollows of the Peruvians,

The mesquite of a jazz trombone,

The Mennonites in hairnets and black sneakers.

I wondered later whether we had become

The engine of concatenation,

Two women made radical
With unappeasable want,

The unassailable desire to remember.