Necklace

Go and buy me a necklace to clasp ten years.

I don't want diamonds or gold.
A junkie snatched my wedding band
for an hour's grace.

Bypass the pearls
for the high school proms
I fingered my mother's cold like hail
pellets against my aching collarbone.

Don't pick out turquoise.
We quarreled in Santa Fe.
I walked the Plaza
and bought myself
blue
for resolute

like the Hopi Old One.
Find me moonstone
milk-white.
I need nourishment
and smooth
for all the hollow places
and silver links
to solder our lives again.

Marti Keller-November 1978

About Dead Earrings

So much has been written about false memory, usually in connection with accusations about or assumptions about adult recollections of childhood abuse. This is not one of those, but it sits there accusingly: if you can not be a good steward, a faithful scribe of even the smallest and least essential events, then how is it possible to bank and thendraw from your larger story?

This is one such incident: I recall being given a piece of jewelry, perhaps a ring with a tiny ruby, perhaps my grandmother's-- who I never knew-- and then losing it under some piece of furniture or down a heating grate. It may have been the beginning of the story that is told in my family, a story that i tell myself about being careless and distracted, spending more of my time losing things than living forward.

it is true about me that long before coming into the age when not finding things is the collective sigh that I have misplaced and then lost so many things, small things mostly, some trinkets, some valuables, and scoured the house, my drawers and closets, the car for them, wailing their loss, many halves of pairs of earrings, those tiny pieces of metal and glimmer that have been handed down, passed on, purchased on foreign vacations, given for birthdays and holidays, and those hoping to mend one relationship or another.

not wanting to believe them lost forever, i have sealed the remaining halves: the turquoise, abalone, clear glass, and diamonds into sandwich bags, or left them scattered across the bottoms of dresser drawers, or in pockets of wool coats. each one of them had an intention in my personal history and deserved better.

One sunday morning (or was it a saturday) this september, my brother doug and i lay these dead earrings, singly and in deliberate groups, on cloth backdrops (old dinner napkins, many also orphaned) on our picket fence. he shot and made digital photos, and expert webmistress lorraine made them page-ready. it is my project now to reconnect with them, to remember them whole again and dangling together, to match them to memory.

i invite you to do the same. to add your pieces of lost pairs, to tell me about carelessness, loss, regret, relief, and reconstitution, as much as it is true for you.

yours faithfully,
MartiOct. 2005

Collage from photgraphs by Doug Greenberg