13 Lines in Order to Forget You a scientist draws a picture of the brain on the blackboard, she labels the memory with a piece of chalk a doctor raises his hand, a question flutters on the tip of his tongue what were we talking about again? meanwhile, a patient with amnesia wanders down the hall and walks out of the hospital how easily you’ve slipped my mind I have forgotten you, and if I were the two-headed woman on the cover of the National Enquirer today I would forget you twice The Naked Eye (in memoriam, HJB) You are so far away, or let’s be truthful, you’ve been dead for twenty years, a synapse in the brain of the city, these streets so fractured, full of spaces. I thought I saw you again this morning, walking the maze of paths behind the planetarium, as if you remembered the time the teachers took us up there, let us read the sky. They told us any loss of matter is converted into energy. They gave us telescopes and metaphors: You disappeared at the speed of light. But some things are apparent only to the naked eye. I can stand on the Norwood Bridge and seem to touch the potent circuit of the river. Venus, small as the spurt of a penny match, appears suspended, caught in the gap of the St. Boniface cathedral’s excoriated window frame. The downtown lights are sparks the city lets go, attempting to purify itself. This city is still hot, young friend, white hot. It runs on the electricity conducted through the streets when heroes turn to constellations. It’s heat that separates the metal from the ore, because in metallurgy, as in death, beauty smoulders closer and closer to the surface of the body, becoming visible at last, setting itself free. The burnt cathedral, with its empty window open like a mouth, says, ah. The sound of finding what it’s lost. If you can see me, make some sign. Darkness is settling down, all over the suburbs, and Venus is rising. I can almost see the passion that set her blazing like a flare, an SOS, a way of saying, don’t stop looking for me. I am here.