Memory by Ruth Roach Pierson

		bordered by the body’s 
		 scribbled outline – a fading 
			solarization negative
	its white beginning 
		 to phosphoresce
		
			beneath the skin an uncurling
	 tangle offilmstrip ripped 
		from canisters – news
 communiqués – instant – release 
			phone – aka – sorry
				
			Mnemosyne 
				– as handmaiden 
		erratic, perturbingly opaque
					implacable 

				I long to hold her 
		somehow – roll her into a cylindrical 
			tube like a kaleidoscope I can turn 
			to reassemble and polish

			all the shards and chips 
				until they acquire the clarity 
		the chiaroscuro of those pioneer cineastes
			the brothers Louis and August Lumiére 

				or the master
			 of the imaginary 
			Georges 
				 Méliès	

			this figure – feet bound – mummy-like 
	 	in silhouette – a steamrolled 
		 		shadow of pitch black bitumen 
			 freshly spread on a country road

		inscribed with barely decipherable 
	figments of speech – power – debt – payment – want 
			fragments of international 
				dispatch – located – yours – truly 
					harmonized 
			into certified filigree

Ruth Roach Pierson is Professor emerita of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto and author of numerous academic studies, Ruth Roach Pierson has published two volumes of poetry with BuschekBooks of Ottawa: Where No Window Was (2002) and Aide-Mémoire (2007), which was named a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry in 2008. Her third poetry collection, Contrary, was launched in 2011 by Tightrope Books of Toronto. With Sue MacLeod, she is currently at work on an anthology of movie poems entitled I Found It at the Movies to be published by Tightrope Books in spring 2013.