By Candice Louisa Daquin

ANAMNESIS It is already arranged. There in the uncluttered portion of my heart where simple things lay flat like pressed linen cloth awaiting the weight of the fork. This year, bruised branches split like dry husks coughing out their hibernating marrow against Winter's frosted, relentless betrothal. You look older, the tugged downturn of your eyes, gravities Siamese clamour as time winnows her efforts with feathering stroke and what is not said lies dormant like unlit coal in our hearth. It is written: If you go, I go with you. We are a chain forged in occidental fate where night lifts her greying skirts to invite morning. I watch you turn fitful in your engulfing sleep all the years flickering like an old 16mm film playing to sleeping audiences with muted sound. The click of tape, machine, motion, glossy in dark -- we know what we see by the familiar ache provoked. Your titan hands lifting me over your head catching pollen in my assent, drooling joy like spider’s web will lacquer lustre in dew moments, so distant, they feel unreal, fiction forged in time, pockets full of aches, wrapped and stored like crab apples, promising no worm. We cannot live with regret so we put it down and step away carefully, polishing suspended breath till beckoned back, years hence, your shoulders dry with prayer, our voices a lament, even in cold air, where articulation is lost. I long to protect you, preserve, return, stave the crease of time from your brow, repair the hours fallen in ascendance where memory has devoured, quilts of bright cold, patched them against coming shriek of wind blowing relentlessly about recollections, fragile tinder when we were young and redolent with seeded urge to climb beyond expectations, arms filled with longing for what is lost now, has no name no place. It scatters like time, is brushed away by us when the room was patterned in 1970's hour paisley print and cold sheets, wan plants leached of sun. Your young heart then, unemptied as my mother's beauty still bore warm flames possessed of solvent wax and nourished hope. I stood in the doorway with my toy badger, watching this paper world unfold in mislaid chapters. Not once did I think of what would not still be waiting, as days become decades we stand on pointe, diminishing photos behind glass put in drawers, wrecked of momentum you, almost a stranger in unschooled history with your thinned lips and stooped back a flicker yet, one ember, one familiar evocation… I am that girl again, claiming your strength lifted over your head, to spin, and whirl and laugh before they blow the candle wick of flame before we must, before we cannot let go.
Candice Louisa Daquin is a Psychotherapist and Editor, having worked in Europe, Canada and the USA. Daquins own work is also published widely, she has written five books of poetry, the last published by Finishing Line Press called Pinch the Lock. Her website is www thefeatheredsleep.com
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4 replies on “Anamnesis”
This touches the place where I discovered my father had really become old.
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Reblogged this on cabbagesandkings524 and commented:
Candice Louisa Daquin – Daughter and father and time
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Very grateful to you all for publishing this.
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Nice poem.
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