EBONY & IVORY MEMORY

A washed out seashell, empty of mollusk, filled with memories that manifest in ghost dreams. A portrait by Irving Penn. You as a young boy with a pet lamb? A Seydou Keita odalisque, her faraway gaze mirroring Anouk in Comme des Garcons graphic garb. I had a shirt like that once. I wore it till it began to disintegrate.

I was reading a book of short stories by Sam Shepard. One day he returns to the town he grew up in. Fragments of narrative. Jagged recollections. Disjointedness of the American tongue. The unknown being much bigger, running around in the body of a child, he wrote. Pawnshop of the mind.

I was thinking about how as a child the unknown seemed much smaller. Maybe that’s because I was an immigrant. And a girl . I ran around a lot too. All over. Especially within myself. I don’t remember caring much about whether things were black and white. And I still don’t.

Still running too, I suppose.

2012