I Forgot the Protection of Diamonds

 

Eileen R. Tabios

 

 

 

 

I forgot the capacity to feel you in the breeze lifting my hair from their shyness. 

 

I forgot color is also a narrative.

 

I forgot memorizing the marks of animals pawing as they hunt.

 

I forgot the sky so lurid it was nonreverberative.

 

I forgot wishing to be pale.

 

I forgot greeting mornings as an exposed nerve.

 

I forgot addiction to Duende for its intimacy with savagery.

 

I forgot jade’s cousin: the green of Antarctic berg ice discovered as a lost emerald rib broken and floating away from a maternal continent.

 

I forgot longing for a sky without horizon, but acceding instead to the eye’s clamor against the opposite of claustrophobia.

 

I forgot your body against mine introduced the limits of sunlight’s expanse.

 

I forgot feeling you in the air against my cheek.

 

I forgot recognitions: a white bird against a grey sky as the same gesture I painted for years as a single brushstroke of turquoise.

 

I forgot the many deflections allowed to enable some semblance of progress.

 

I forgot the World War II concentration camp where amnesiacs tortured by tying together the legs of pregnant women.

 

I forgot feeling Michelangelo’s slaves surge out of stone.

 

I forgot both perception and imperceptibility carry a price.

 

I forgot obviating memory for what I believed was a higher purpose.

 

I forgot the cocoon hanging from a tree like a tender promise.  I forgot deferring judgment.

 

I forgot astonishment over a block of grey metal swallowing light.

 

I forgot becoming my own sculpture when I crawled on a floor to see color from different angles.

 

I forgot the liberating anonymity conferred by travel: Mindanao, Berlin, Melbourne, Amsterdam, Istanbul became hours requiring no count.

 

I forgot New Mexico whose adobe walls were soothed by brown paper bag lanterns glowing from their lit candles.

 

I forgot a good day can be approximated by eating a red apple while strolling through white snow.

 

I forgot aching for fiction that would not chasten my days.

 

I forgot admiring Picasso’s Sleeping Nude, 1907, for its lack of sentimentality.

 

I forgot your favorite color was water.

 

I forgot chafing at eating food earned by someone else, each swallow bequeathing an ineffable with the demeanor of ice.

 

I forgot the colors of a scream: the regret of crimson, the futility of pink, the astonishment of brown.

 

I forgot the protection of his diamonds.

 

I forgot how detachment includes.  I forgot how detachment enabled a white rattlesnake to penetrate my dreams.

 

I forgot death without forgetting my mortality.

 

I forgot your betrayal that forever marks me like a heart’s tattoo blossoming painfully against an inner thigh.

 

I forgot the bliss deep within an ascetic’s eyes as he wandered with a beggar’s bowl.

 

I forgot dust motes trapped in a tango after the sun lashed out a ray.

 

I forgot admiring women who refuse to paint their lips.

 

I forgot the bald girl whose neck increasingly thinned until I could count the ropes stretched along her throat.

 

I forgot the plainest of bread can clear an oenophile’s palate.

 

I forgot learning to appreciate rust, and how it taught me bats operate through radar.

 

I forgot I was not an immigrant; I was simply myself who lacked control at how the world formed outside the “Other” of me.

 

I forgot dancing furious flamenco with vultures under a menopausal sun.

 

I forgot one can use color to prevent encounters from degenerating into lies.

 

I forgot Mom beginning to age when she started looking at the world through heartbreaking resignation.

 

I forgot even a boor can pause before a Rembrandt portrait.

 

I forgot jasmine insisted it was the scent of gold.

 

I forgot how one begins marking time from a lover’s utterance of Farewell.

 

I forgot how an erasure captures the threshold of consciousness.

 

I forgot the night was unanimous.

 

I forgot clutching the wet mane of a panicked horse.

 

I forgot the spine bent willingly for a stranger’s whip.

 

I forgot you were the altar that made me stay.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Eileen R. Tabios loves books and has released over 20 print and five electronic poetry collections; an art essay collection; a “collected novels” book; a poetry essay/interview anthology; a short story collection; and an experimental biography.  Her 2014 poetry collections are 147 MILLION ORPHANS (MMXI-MML), 44 RESURRECTIONS and SUN STIGMATA (Sculpture Poems).  Eileen R. Tabios is online at EileenRTabios.com. 

 

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