In Margaret Randall’s “Memory, Photographic and Otherwise,” the mind’s camera is opened up to reveal its mercurial archive. The photographs it contains may be incomplete, imperfect, or unreliable, yet their rhythms of presence and absence, comfort and surprise, give depth to their companionship and provide the grounds for their personification. The faces here collected may vanish or turn away, yet even a partial appearance “has work to do.” Water and weather appear as external stimuli and as ongoing recurrence, a living aid to memory. And water also lends the material with which memory itself might be figured: as rain, as a flood, as a reservoir. While the human traces of trails, pathways, and maps perform a similar function, these last hint that our roads might go nowhere, and that moving entails the possibility of getting lost. Yoking all these metaphors together, Randall’s poem sets out on the unsteady terrain that promises belonging amid a disappearing world, and hints that we might still act meaningfully within it. -The Editors and Poetry Staff
Memory, Photographic and Otherwise
A few hesitant photographs
hide their faces in shame,
others maintain equilibrium
through these 82 years,
revealing a friend
on my journey
whose face I no longer remember.
Some memories embrace me
in steady company,
others leap from the trail
when a torrent of water
roars through a narrow canyon
or shrivel to dust
where rain abandons the tinaja.
Some photos are cracked or frayed
but continue to bring
into fragile focus
where I have been and why.
Others document events
that never happened:
holograms of my desire.
These clues, mysterious or definitive,
reach out to take me by the hand,
overcome weariness,
impatience and lies,
know they still have work to do
along pathways that have yet
to reach the map’s edge.