Blackbird Archive
← v13n1, Spring 2014
Poetry · Volume 13, Number 1

In Memoriam

Circe Maia

A ring, a chair,

but above all the glasses, that appear, suddenly

as if ready to put on.

“Where did I leave my glasses?” The constant question

is inaudible now but can almost be heard

or rather, it is now in the twilight zone

between reality and remembrance. Stronger

than a single memory, the question sticks

to the glasses and makes them swing

between what is here now—silence—

and what was on the day when your glasses

were always forgotten: Ah, my glasses!

Where did I put them?

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Circe Maia

Circe Maia is the author of nine books of poetry, including her collected poems, Obra poética (Rebeka Linke Editoras, 2007). She has also written an autobiographical novel, Un Viaje a Salto (Ediciones del Nuevo Mundo, 1987), which was published in a bilingual edition in the U.S. by Swan Isle Press in 2004. In the novel, Maia recounts her experience of the 1972 civic-military dictatorship in Uruguay, in which military police invaded her home and arrested her husband due to his support of the MLN-Tupamaros, leaving Maia behind with the couple’s youngest daughter, to whom she had just given birth. She has lived most of her life in Tacuarembó in northern Uruguay.