The Lyric as Inquiry

There is a country the body remembers
before it remembers itself—
the place where the name lived
before the name was spoken,
and the wound was a window
that would not close.

Plato called it knowledge
recovered, the soul
that arrives already knowing
what it has not yet seen,
the cup of ice
that was always cold.

I have lived there.
In the kitchen at three,
in the bus between two silences,
in the field where my grandmother
was a girl before
she was my grandmother.

What survives?
Not the face, not the door.
The light that fell
across the hand that opened it,
and the ambrose of the breath
that stopped to listen.

Memory is not a record.
It is the rehearsal
of a return
the body has not yet made—
the small resurrection
of a thing never lost.

I am writing this
in the country I am in
so that the country I came from
will know I have not
forgotten the way
to leave it again.

Anamnesis. Anamnesis.
The word itself is a homecoming,
a long O,
a door in the floor
that opens
into the floor.