People we see once: flood of faces, coats,
collars--on avenues and plazas, in markets,
theatres, bars, banks, hospitals. A bent
shape hoeing weeds: one of us saw it once
one place from a train: This
is an example but only of itself. Its
singularity can’t be transposed. Imagine
you remember the person who interested you
terribly in that café that morning that city.
Sure it happened, but you don’t remember
because once was not enough. People we
see once compose our lives. Forgetting
them (we must), we lose wide arenas
of the lived. Even ghosts return, but not
the vast mass of once-only-noticed
who compose medium and matrix
of our one time here. We are adjacent and
circumstantial to strangers, one jostle
of flux away from knowing next to everything
about their lives. The river of moments takes
a different channel; the one moment becomes nothing now.
The once-only appear, then appear to go
to an Elsewhere that defines us. They go on
to get to know who they get to know.
Their lives are theoretically real to us, like
subatomic particles. To them their lives
are practically real to them. From their
view, ours are not. We know they were there,
vivid strangers, because they always are,
every day. Like a wreath floating
on the ocean, memory marks a space
abandoned. In large measure life is
recall of spaces occupied. History
consists of someone who insists on being
remembered, someone who insists on
remembering, combinations of both. Familiarity
and routine join to vie methodically; they
capture places in recall. Vivid strangers are
incidentally crucial, indigenous to a
present moment that is like a mist
over a meadow, rising, evaporating
just when we arrive, past as we are present.
