deleting history/poems

I'm deleting my emails from the uark.edu account that will soon be deleted. They only keep it open until the 12th day of the semester of which you are not longer a student. That semester, for me, is going to start very soon. And somehow going through the emails from friends, listservs, and organizations is filling my heart with a little sadness. Not that it hadn't hit me the fact that college is now part of the past, but I'm not where I was hoping to be where this time were to come.
It's not my fault that I'm not there yet. It's just that I'm not meant to be there yet. There are circumstances that won't let me get past a certain point, and sadly, many can't understand and so they think I'm the one who doesn't make it happen.....and they think I can't see it in their eyes.

Anyhow, I found a couple of poems in one of the two thousand emails I'm going through right now. I had emailed these to myself for an assignment, but oh how they speak to me!

Here they are:


I must have known you -- by Ricky Flores

I must have known you
We passed each other a thousand times
Never talking yet forever, you, echoing in my memory

I must have known you
Through the fog of time resonating like a beating heart fading in the distance
Never talking yet,

Yet,

There you are

Shaping everything through the passion of your words
That I never heard
Not once in my lifetime

Yet,

There they are

Always there

My life written out on a page that I never saw
My life intimately exposed on a page for all to see
Was that life, my own, written on the page as you stood watch over me?
Or did I take yours and made it my own?

I must have known you
How else do I explain the eerie semblance of our lives?
That connection of remembrance of a life that you lived or was that life my own?

In the fog of time we parted and what was left was the page

______________________________


Forgetfulness by Billy Collins


The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

_______________________________

I Wanted by Roque Dalton

I wanted to talk about life of all its melodious
corners I want to gather in a river of words
the dreams and the names what is left unsaid
in the newspapers the pains of the solitary
surprised in the nooks of the rain
rescue the leafless parabolas of lovers and give them to you
laid before the games played by a child
elaborating his sweet daily destruction
I wanted to pronounce the syllables of the people
the sounds of its grief
show you where their hearts limp
insinuate those who only deserve a bullet
in the back tell you of my own countries
impose on you from the exoduses from the great
emigrations which opened up all the roads of the world
of the love of even the bedraggled one over there
by the ditches
speak to you of the trains
of my friend who killed himself with another’s knife
of the history of all the men broken
by blindness by myth’s reefs
of the century which my three sons will outlast
of the bird’s tongue and the furious foam
in the stampede of the great four-legged beast
and I wanted to talk to you of the Revolution
of Cuba and the Soviet Union
and of the girl that I love for her eyes
of shortened storm
and of your lives filled with dawns
and of people who ask who saw you who said that
how could it’ve been done I got here
before you
and of all of nature’s things
and of the heart and its testimonies
of the last fingerprints before total annihilation
of the tiny animals and of tenderness
I wanted to yes say to you all of that and tell you
lots of stories I know and in turn were told to me
or that I learned by living in that great room of pain
and things said by other poets before me
and that are good for you to know
And I can’t give you more — closed door of poetry —
than my own corpse beheaded in the sand.