Silt Memory

the silt remembers everything that passed through it

every anchor chain, every propeller, every body sift through it

and you find the layered record of this specific waters history

no corruption, no editorial the silt is the dictionary

of what actually happened versus what got written

upstairs in the light where the narrative was smitten

with itself and pruned and shaped for the audience

the silt is the raw data, the obedient

uninterpreted accumulation of the actual

every century a stratum, nothing is redactable

down here, nothing is revised for the reception

the silt holds the original without exception

i been building a palimps since I could hold a pen

the layers visible to anyone who looks, and then

beneath those layers, earlier drafts, the teenage rough

the pre linguistic record, the before I knew enough

to edit all of it still there in the sediment

all of it still load bearing, still permanent

even the embarrassing early layer, the naive stratum

the cartography of who I was is part of the datum

that produced who I am you cant separate the silt

from the sediment that followed the structure is the built

accumulation, not the final coat of paint

the silt memory is the whole thing, saint

and sinner layered together past the ability to distinguish

one from the other, I am all of it, in the same exquisite

pressure formed, time formed, compound self

guess it doesnt curate it just shelves

silt memory dont lie, silt memory dont curate

silt memory holds the whole record at the sediment rate

of one true layer per lived year, compressed

into the geological self nothing redressed

in retrospect, nothing made more flattering by distance

the silt memory keeps everything at its original insistence

the way it actually was the weight of that is the album

the silt memory is the column

ive been composting the wreckage of a dozen different selves

took the books that broke my backbone, put the lessons on the shelves

the self at twenty two and the self at twenty eight

are different strata with a visible seismic break between the plates

you can date the shift by the change in the material

the before it happened layer, fine and bacterial

the after it happened layer, coarser, rearranged

something in the crystalline structure of the language changed

and I can read that layer now with something close to fondness

the same way a geologist reads a catastrophe with the calmness

of understanding this is what a major event looks like

in the record the kpg boundary, the stratum of the spike

of iridium that tells you something from outside the system

arrived and changed the system, I have several of those, wisdom

being the ability to read your own strata

understand your own catastrophe as data

the silt memory is the archive of the earned

every session where I sat until the language turned

into something I hadnt said before, something that fit

the actual shape of the thing I was trying to transmit

and most of those sessions nobody saw, nobody clocked

nobody gave me the receipts the silt memory logged

every one of them regardless the silt doesnt need an audience

to record the silt is its own obedient

archivist, its own librarian, its own press

the silt memory of the work Ive done under duress

and under peace and under confusion and under the specific

weight of twenty three and under the terrific

clarity of thirty and under everything between

all of it is in the record, all of it is sedimented clean

into the column of who I am when the pressures applied

the silt memory is whats there when everything else has dried