In today’s Poem of the Day, The New York Sun’s associate poetry editor, Sally Thomas, looks at memory. Or rather, she looks at the fictions of art — the falseness, the untrue-to-memory that poetry imposes on the poet. The author of the 2020 collection “Motherland” and the recent novel, “Works of Mercy” — and editor, with the critic Micah Mattix, of the new anthology, “Christian Poetry in America Since 1940” — Ms. Thomas is a poet in North Carolina with a deep appreciation of formal verse.

In “Hindsight,” a set of pentameter quatrains, she follows her memory from the things she is sure remembers to things about which she is less sure. And how, she asks, shall she fill in the memory with the writer’s touch — a necessary falsity taking the place of the forgotten details and the half-remembered settings? And so with the overall feeling: How shall we remember as a golden time what at the time may not have seemed so?

Hindsight
by Sally Thomas

Silence fell at daybreak, when an early
Riser or a late-to-bedder might
Glance out into nothingness, pierced only
By a bicycle’s flickering red taillight

Dwindling into gray, a seagoing boat
That breasts the morning tide and, traveling down
The world’s hazy curve, is lost to sight.
My memory likewise sets out from the known

World of things I’m sure I saw and heard,
Into murky unmapped waters. If I wrote, 
Those were happier days, at which false word
Would the anchor drag? Or the opposite —

I cried buying clementimes in the market —
If I say it, I cannot make it true,
Or truer than it is. Coins in my pocket?  
Yes. Were they enough? That, I don’t know. 

I see now, in my mind, the clear pondwater
Aspect of a gusty winter sunset.
Starlings swirl like sediment. My daughter
Says — what? — as I watch them.  I forget.

I remember how things looked, our narrow flat,
The lane rain-silvered. I can almost hear
Wind shivering through our windows. More than that? 
It isn’t there. It isn’t anywhere.

___________________________________________ 

With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.