Who Made Passing Time Our Judge?

When I was a child of nine or ten, I began to tell myself that all I had to do to remember a moment was say "I'll remember this forever" and look really hard at whatever was happening in front of me. Everything was worth remembering. The duck shape a weeping juniper made in our front yard. Pine needles stuck in the blue plastic Velcro carpet of our family boat. My mother telling my father to get more milk and bread, and the way he firmly tied his feet into his shoes as he said, "yes dear."

What I remember most vividly from those mental recording sessions is a time I sat in the back of my parents' tan Ford Aerostar. While waiting for them to join me in the car, I stared at the closed kitchen door in the dusk of the garage and thought "I'll remember this forever." Forever isn't eighteen years, but it's all I've had since then. So far, I remember that moment and the one that came before it--the one where I decided this was a moment worth remembering--perfectly.

I started writing poems at about the same age. As I've gotten older, I've begun to see the relationship between these two intensely private, possibly pointless habits. Richard Hugo first made the connection for me in the "Statements of Faith" chapter in The Triggering Town:

"One problem for modern poets is the wholesale changes in what we see--the tearing down of buildings, the development of new housing, the accelerated rate of loss of all things that can serve as visual checkpoints and sources of stability...

With the accumulated losses of knowns, the imagination is faced with the problem of preserving the world through internalization, then keeping that world rigidly fixed long enough to create the unknowns in the poem (Rilke spoke of his.) Today, memory must become thought's ally. Though the process becomes more complicated and challenging, I believe the accelerated loss of knowns accounts for the increasing number of people writing poems."

In other words (or, at least, in my other words), as I started to understand how the passage of time would change everything around me, including my parents and brother and the big house we lived in, including the 4 foot 9 and three-quarters girl-angle with which I saw the world, I answered that realization with stubbornness. I wanted to hang on. I wanted to keep things. I'll remember this forever. Those memories eventually turned into poems, or, as Hugo would say, the "unknowns" of my poems.

Don't get me wrong, I've never written a poem about sitting in a Ford Aerostar and I have no intentions to do so. The specific moments aren't important--the nouns of the thing. It's the verbs--the saving, the capturing, the keeping. For me, writing poems has always been about reenacting an experience in a way that helps the reader feel it too, and by doing that I'm able to defy the passage of time, which is way of defying death. No, not exactly. By doing that I make something that mattered before matter again. Or matter anew. Good poems enact something. Maybe I'm talking about empathy. Maybe I'm talking about art. I'm not sure.

Photos can enact memory, but they do it differently. This photo of a rhubarb custard pie will always remind me of how, on the first almost-sunny day of 2011, Jason and I decided to throw a barbecue, and that barbecue turned into a party, and that party ate all of my rhubarb custard pie while drinking all the beer in Ballard before going home at midnight so that my landlord, who lives below us, wouldn't wonder if he'd rented his house to frat boys. The magenta smear of rhubarb as captured by my iPhone's hipstamatic isn't an accurate representation of how the pie really looked, or even tasted (rhubarb custard is a rich cream taste, not a hot neon taste), but the unreality of that red is a lot like what that Saturday felt like: a vitamin-D mood surge that provided a brief respite from the seriousness of teaching and schoolwork and rain rain rain. That day, that pie, and those friends made the whole month of May feel like one night.

It's May. Startling, isn't it? Wasn't it just January? In three weeks I'll finish the first half of my MFA program. In three weeks I'll be ecstatically and anxiously unemployed while I try to rest, write, get back into a regular pie routine. My main source of income will be sales of A Commonplace Book of Pie, bake sales, and the occasional loan from my folks. I'm worried about paying the rent. I'm excited to be a writer for another summer. What's the cliche? It can't come fast enough.

Rhubarb Custard Pie

from a pamphlet by the Washington State Hothouse Rhubarb Council

1/2 a double pie crust recipe (cut the measurements exactly in half)

3 cups diced rhubarb

1 1/2 cups sugar

3 tablespoons flour

pinch of salt

1/2 teaspoon nutmeg

2 eggs

2 tablespoons milk

1 tablespoon butter

Prepare the pastry. Roll it out on wax paper until it is 2 to 3 inches wider than a 9 inch pie plate. Invert the pastry into the pan, center it, peel of the wax paper, and tuck it gently into the pan. Trim excess dough and form an upstanding ridge. Refrigerate the bottom crust while you make the filling.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

Wash and dice unpeeled rhubarb and mix with sugar, flour, salt and nutmeg. Beat eggs slightly, then add milk and mix. Combine with rhubarb mixture. Pour into your pie shell and dot the surface with small chunks of the butter. Bake on 400 for 50 to 60 minutes. The pie is done when the crust is golden and the center remains firm when shaken gently. The custard will be translucent and slightly settled at the bottom of pie.

Cool on a wire rack for at least an hour. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Note: I stole the title of this blog entry from Sarah Lindsay's excellent poem Zucchini Shofar.