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Speak, my brother, of angels half-remembered,
almost forgotten; of voices whose timbres
bounce analog memories from ears
to cells and back again to memory.

Speak, so that I may remember, even though
the sharpest of my recollections will be
limited by the silences between your words.

It is easy enough to memorialize through
words and possessions, but the tangibility
of a vanished existence relies on the
remembrance of pauses between word and word;
hesitations between word and glance.

It is the spaces between that transform
recollection into memory,
and remembrance from storytelling.

This is the beginning of the forgetting:
of the transformation from you and I
to he and she. Look carefully; the blurring
began with your first memory. Do you not see
the haze of indistinctness creeping upon you?

When you die, grief will sharpen my memories
of you until you, too, blur into the color
of forgetting. When I am asked to speak
of you, I will tell them of the silences
between your words, and hope it is enough.

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