“Memory is the sense of loss.”

– Marilynne Robinson,

“Housekeeping”

“Loss pulls us after it” – maybe the way

the tongue goes after a lost tooth,

finding the gap, but not the tooth.

“There is so little to remember

of anyone – an anecdote,

a conversation at table,” if there was

a table. Yet: “Memory is their only grave,”

a survivor says, trying to remember.

Her name is Lily, out of Auschwitz.

They have no graves, she says, just stories.

The tongue finds the gap, tells stories

but never fills it.

Too much life was there.

– Max Sutton lives in Eudora.