Coming to terms with oss …

… ‘All of time is cut in two’ | The Russell Kirk Center. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Espaillat writes about memory as loss but also as continuity, as in her description of water from her father’s house, “the varicolored silk of tropic rain / we drew out of the rusty spigot, skein / after skein.” Her memories reach both into the past and the future, a story that continues while being made up of individuals who come and go and are forgotten—“an endless chain whose links cannot endure.” Her mother, father, grandmother, and many nameless relatives are all here, and she sees herself as taking her place among them, under no illusions about the fact that one day she’ll be one of those nameless faces:
one day this will be you
a woman staring through
film at which strangers stare.
You will not see them there.