Pressure: Air

Pressure. That’s how I found myself pushing, prodding, prevailing over the keyboard to arrive at “Proselegy and Coda,” my publication in Brevity’s Fall 2007 issue.

Since 2005, I’ve been digging up a memoir. That book is tentatively set for Fall 2008 publication through the University of Iowa Press. During the revision stage, the editor said “You’re not showing much emotion when you described the death of your parents, especially considering they occurred so close together.”

That communication arrived before I signed a contract. I understood I was being challenged to show that I can convey scene, character, and emotion with words – to do, in fact, what I thought I could not: evoke the visceral subconscious remembrance of the pain of my parents’ deaths.

I read through the original memoir chapter, that recitation of facts, that grave of memories, reluctant to exhume and reexamine what cannot be changed. Need I know more? Need I grieve more? And let people watch? The questions hissed, lightly, persistently in the background – like the sleep apnea respirator that feeds me air all night.

Air. That catalyst for the fuel we consume to live. Air. That creates words that mean nothing, that are fit only to cheapen the loss upon the death of the woman and the man who made you flesh. Such a thing nearly overwhelms words, causing even the glib to descend into inarticulate gloom, at least for a time, unless you’re Didion. The best that could be had from my psyche two decades post-loss was fragments, thoughts, broken images memory-seared and gathered up from pieces of all that was shattered by death.

Thus, a prose-poem, “Proselegy and Coda,” because I have no coherent thought about love and loss that might transcend all that I think I remember.

– Gary Presley