Spiraling Toward Remembrance
Eva Guillot


“The desires of the heart are as
crooked as corkscrews”
from Sarah Polley’s Away From Her

The spire of the church loomed over him,
its windows empty as the eyes of the dead.
He searched through the loneliness
for enlightenment, anything to hold him firm

stop him from falling skyward broaching
the ethereal or wickedly good. The eyes of the spire blinked
taunting him to enter the sanctuary
once forbidden, not embracing.

Confusion milked with momentary lapses of faith
in simple yellow, green apples, clouds.
He shut his eyes spiraling away from the
church and chanting, the water and the wine,

gagging on the tin wafer.
“Do I dare disturb her universe? If those
eyes are dead, how could it matter now?”
Early on she pushed him away,

leaving four lies and two lives running parallel, never touching,
never ending, going on and on like an illusion.
His life under her embrace was all about the desires of the heart.
And in the end it was all about the forgetting.

“Elephants have long memories,” she once told him.
“They never forget. It is all about those long months
with their babies. They cannot forget that.”
She never forgot his betrayal. It haunted

him during those years he watched after her,
the baths and laundry peppered with insults
he swallowed whole still loving her stubbornness,
the tenacity of an uneducated woman. Until the end.


“I forgot what yellow means. Is it in the
butterfly perched upon that flower?”
I do not remember.

“Or is it that ugly blouse you bought me?
I reminded you, I never wear yellow.”
I do not remember.

“Watch closely, blink and I will
disappear, but not for long.”
I am not gone.

“For my sake, do not remember that her
hair was yellow, golden in the wintry lines of light.”
I remember all too well.

He sat across her at the kitchen table, perfect posture,
waiting and watching, wondering if
the moment would ever come
when he could tell her, “You are not gone.”

And even though the nicotine stains had faded
from his fingers, her smell lingered through
their conversations, yellowing years of regrets and
silences. She made it easy to forget the names,

the sandaled feet. Just continue on the lines,
lifting needle, gliding yarn through years of covers,
reaching a place and nowhere at all.
She made it harder to remember the lightness of

her dancing touch across his belly, her soft
whispers, the longing for forgiveness.
A shrug here, scented soap there. Nothing
tangible, always hovering like a suicidal moth

running toward the flickering flame.
He turned once again, looking directly into
the lit church windows, searching his
loneliness for answers she would not,

could not unfold. The eyes of the spire
blinked off one silent window at a time
snuffing out the desires of his heart
forever.