The Things I’ve Forgotten

I’ve forgotten the sound of his laugh,
which is the thing I fear most —
Not the photographs, not the ghost
Of the memory in the specific locations,
But the specific oscillations
Of his laugh — the specific rhythm
And frequency and the whim
Of what made it come out, what made it fully his.

I remember that he laughed often and easily —
The character of the laugh I remember, breezily
Confident and fully present, the laugh
Of a man comfortable enough to laugh —
But the specific sound of it, the actual acoustic
Of the laugh, is losing its music
In the five years of the absence.

I’ve forgotten the sound of his laugh, which is the grief
I didn’t expect — the specific brief
Recording in the memory going dark
Not all at once but in the specific arc
Of the fade, the gradual attenuation
Of the acoustic memory, the narration
Of the voice going from specific to general.

I’ve been going through the videos on the phone —
There are three, which is three more than none alone,
Three ordinary recordings from ordinary occasions
That caught his laugh in the equations
Of the amateur video — and I’ve been listening
To the specific sound of it, glistening
In the recording, retrieving the actual from the fading memory.

And the specific is still in the recording — the specific
Register, the vernacular
Quality of the laugh — and the retrieval
Of the specific from the video is medieval
In its particularity, the listening
To the recording as the christening
Of the actual back into the present.

The specific forgetting is the secondary grief —
The loss of the loss itself, the relief
And the horror of the memory’s attenuation,
The specific narration
Of a person growing more general in the mind
Of the person who loved them, the find
Of the video as the specific’s last defender.