Patti Smith’s M Train in May
Cafe ’Ino.
Photograph: Patti Smith courtesy of Robert Miller Gallery
What does it mean to recall all the places and things we’ve loved in our lives, those we wish never to forget.
She sits down and returns to the moments that slipped through the floorboards of her life, with coffee.
What could a life lived with history look like?
To carry forward the people and relics that reach into the gaps between your heart and your lungs.
What would I collect? The tickets and rocks that live in my drawers.
I want to throw everything else away and leave only those things surfacing above the pile.
I would pack them and take them with me.
Like the photograph I brought to competitions, folded into the smallest pocket of my golf bag.
I would take it out and place it on the bedside table when I slept, the torn corner leaning against the wall beside the paisley pillowcase.
That room was sad. Empty, except for the hotel phone next to my head.
That photograph is still wrinkled, lying above the books on my shelf.
It is no longer a relic I carry, but it has become an object of my own history.
A relic’s second life, gathering dust in my blue painted drawers.
How must it feel to lose someone? More than one?
Her great love is great loss.
Time sidesteps me, getting ahead when I shut my eyes.
What do I do with all this love? Where can I put all this love I have for you?
I must learn to live in time, to feel it slip past and silence me. I must sit in the mornings.
I must refuse to let myself slip within the cracks of my own floorboards.
lonely disco dancer 