Of course the point of Passages is that I copied them for a reason.

Sometimes it is safe to do so but why let them lie there, dumb museum pieces, listless zoo creatures, captured.

I am guilty of that since youth: Laying ideas out and assuming they will spread on their own.

It is a seductive notion for me. I like that idea of a mental conspiracy where influence is not reached through publication or commodity but through the air, through the breath, through our consonant-less mutterings to self that cluck and stutter like impatient pigeons.

Let me explain my attraction to these lines:

I would like a simple life
Yet all night I am laying
Poems away in a long box.

It is my immortality box,
My lay-away plan,
my coffin.

        THE AMBITION BIRD
        Anne Sexton

A few years ago I picked up a book at Seaburn Books on Broadway. The book was Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles, but it could have been any book of a narrative genre. I had spent much of that day at the boneyard, reading tombstones, contemplating mortality and the way we remember each other.

Before stopping at the bookstore I came home to look for stories behind some of the burials I found that day.

Memory is something I will never grasp. The mechanical process, the machinations of remembering what to remember is a process littered by biases and unspoken anxiety. Memory is a critic. Memory is a filtered product. I thought about that as I spent the day wandering the paths of individuals’ lingering testaments and wrestling with random legacies.

Without articulating it to myself at the time I know now what I was thinking: How can I be remembered? How will I be recalled, if at all?

A somewhat irritating but enduring memory of a high school friend flew threw the open cage of my mind: A year or two after high school my friend from school for some reason pronounced that neither he nor I would be remembered by anybody else in our graduating class. Ever. He specifically singled out for scorn the idea that I would be remembered by anyone with whom we went to high school.

I think he was nervous about something.

When I opened to a middle chapter of Sheltering Sky, one of my day’s questions was answered: This is how someone lives forever. This is one way. Through the intricate code of words we share the energies and distortions that are our memories, and we wait for them to connect at random, thereby growing that mental conspiracy.

A simple, obvious observation that had escaped me for years.

Sexton writes of her "immortality box," reminding me of the gravestones I had seen at the cemetery that day. Her not-so-subtle demand for immortality, and my vaguely annoyed feeling that she very well attained that without having to articulate it, reminded me of that nearly mystical feeling of opening that book and feeling Paul Bowles step from the pages. "This," I thought, "is how to do it. This is how you live forever"

 I did not buy Sheltering Sky that day, because I already own a copy. Instead I bought Bowles’ Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue, an unimpressive volume which I might take another look at now that I think of it.