Three Poems by Jeanne Wagner

Because My Memory Began Too Soon

        Adults rarely remember events from before the age of three.
        It’s a phenomenon known as ‘infantile amnesia.’

                ―Queensland Brain Institute

I’m the one who’s cursed with remembering it all.
My first sight, the light bleeding through the blinds.

What I felt, what she felt, in the moments after birth.
We were a woman in pain, turning towards the wall.

Memory, the attic that enters you, is never cleaned.
Memory is like furniture you can’t take back.

The light, when it flowed, was like milk for the eyes.
I knew myself only as the seer then, and not the seen.

*

Birthstone

When I was thirteen, everything was a metaphor―maybe
half a metaphor, the other half still a riddle in the heart.

Money, another metaphor, was everywhere in our house.
Scattered in kitchen drawers and on countertops.

In discarded dishes where we kept those unwanted coins
we call change. “Take what you need,” my mother said.

Who knew what I needed the day I went to the neighbor’s
auction and found, displayed, a pair of amethyst geodes.

Stones with smaller stones gestating inside of them.
I thought it must be what they meant by a motherlode.

Stones sliced open like soft Anjou pears, exposing their litter
of lilac crystals. Shards of purple light rising like stalagmites,

or like the glistening booty tumbling from pirate chests
in comic books, their lids agape, their gems laid bare.

Someone at the auction must have driven up the price
that day. Must have loved them as much as I did.

How eagerly I shelled out my two dollars and fifty cents,
innocent of whole new anxieties heading my way.

Over dinner, my father told me I was an easy mark. A girl
who’s taken advantage of―who splurges on the first

garish rocks that come her way― unpolished and raw.
The day after the auction, I had to knock on our neighbor’s

door and beg for my money back. I had to learn even
beauty can be a commodity: can be mounted,
carved into facets, twisted around a finger or delicately
broached, those little gold prongs pinning it down.

*

A Thousand Doors

Who said, The day opens with a thousand doors?
An image conceived by some compulsive smiler who
springs from her bed each morning like a startled doe.

Someone who doesn’t wake slowly, as I do,
a half-forgotten dream roving up my shins.
The door a stage mother ready to steer a sleeper

like me into the troubled world. Tell me the image
of a thousand doors isn’t the nightmare you’d get
from being forced to watch that old game show,

the one with three doors, repeating in a perpetual loop,
or those scenes from old movies where the Nazis
or the Stasi are beating down doors.

Or that photo of a bombed-out building,
its one remaining door opening onto empty air.
And then there’s the door I almost overlooked,

the one in the Velázquez’s painting, Las Meninas,
The way it reveals a lone courtier standing
in a slender flag of light, the only one seeing

the room from the rear, as if in freeze-frame,
because we know time stops for a second
whenever you open a door. Or close it.

That man in the back of the room reminding me
of my father in those sweet childhood goodnights
of ours. How he stood in the door light

as it framed a silhouette of a round head,
ears with small, furled tips, his slender form
familiar yet otherworldly in the dark,

lingering there long enough to show me
that there is only one safe door in the world.
And I left it long ago.

*

Jeanne Wagner’s book, One Needful Song, was the winner of the 2024 Catamaran Prize. She is also the author of four chapbooks and three previous full-length collections. Her work has appeared in North American Review, Cincinnati Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Shenandoah and The Southern Review. A retired tax accountant, she lives in Kensington, California.