WORKS
|
Poetry
|
Memory

Memory

A poem about retention and loss: how experience can flood a life yet refuse to stay fixed. In “Memory,” Georgia Shreve imagines recollection as matter that flakes, drifts, and sifts away, leaving only partial traces.

First published: 
May 28, 2019

Published in

In “Memory,” Shreve explores remembrance as a process of erosion rather than preservation. The poem opens with a clear refusal, “It does not stick to me,” then develops a tactile vocabulary of surfaces, fragments, and residue to show how lived experience passes through the self without settling into stable archive.

Its imagery is intimate but unsentimental. Photographs, pages, bottles, glue, film, each traditional metaphor of preservation is invoked only to be declined. What remains is motion: memory as flow, shedding, and sieve, where the speaker is not empty of life but unable to hold it in fixed form.

Memory

By Georgia Shreve

It does not stick to me,
Keeping the blood of experience
Flowing through me, unending.
When its fragile pieces fly off
Into the open air of thought.
Flakes of time
Peel off my weathered surfaces,
Stripping pictures
Form the meager stock that remains.

Oceans of lived life flood through me
But little stays—
Not pinned down,
Or pressed between pages,
Not bottled or pickled,
Or glued in place,
Not preserved on film,
But passing always
Through the merciless sieve.

Reading Notes

What gives “Memory” its depth is its decision to frame memory not as treasure chest, but as unstable material. From the first line, “It does not stick to me,” Shreve rejects the familiar fantasy that meaningful experience naturally settles into durable form. Instead, she presents consciousness as a moving surface where impressions arrive vividly, then loosen. The tone is calm, even measured, but that restraint makes the poem’s sorrow more potent. Nothing dramatic is announced, yet everything is quietly slipping.

The poem’s central metaphorical field is tactile and physical. “Memory” is rendered as blood, flakes, surfaces, pictures, stock. These are not abstract terms. They belong to touch, skin, and handling. “Flakes of time / Peel off my weathered surfaces” is especially strong because it fuses duration with material fatigue. Time does not simply pass. It exfoliates. The self is figured as a weathered object, marked by exposure, carrying evidence of life even as its outer layers lift away.

One of the poem’s most effective moves is its syntax of negation. In the second half, Shreve offers a sequence of archival possibilities, “Not pinned down, / Or pressed between pages, / Not bottled or pickled, / Or glued in place, / Not preserved on film,” only to refuse each one. This catalogue of failed preservation methods creates cumulative emotional force. It reads like an inventory of human attempts to outwit forgetting: scrapbooks, keepsakes, records, images, all named and gently dismissed. The poem does not mock these impulses. It honors them by showing their limits.

Scale also plays a crucial role. “Oceans of lived life flood through me / But little stays” holds abundance and scarcity in a single breath. The speaker is not under-lived; she is overfilled. Experience is vast, continuous, and even overwhelming, yet retention is minimal. That paradox gives the poem its philosophical weight. Memory is not represented as a simple function of how much one has lived. It is represented as a different faculty entirely, governed by permeability rather than volume.

The closing image, “the merciless sieve,” is devastating in its plainness. A sieve does not hate what it loses. It is simply built to let certain things pass. That neutrality intensifies the ache. Forgetting here is not betrayal, not moral failure, not lack of feeling. It is structure. And yet the poem itself stands as counter-gesture: by naming the loss with such precision, Shreve creates a form of holding that memory alone could not provide. The poem’s lasting power lies in this tension, accepting impermanence while still making an artifact from it.

Purchase Messages Never Sent today!

Now Available: Messages Never Sent, Georgia’s debut poetry book, at select Manhattan bookstores and on Kindle.

Purchase Now
The Corner Bookstore

1313 Madison Ave
New York, NY 10128
United States

Book Off

49 W 45th St
New York, NY 10036
United States

Explore more

Poetry

by Georgia

VIEW FEATURED WORK

Poetry
Mother in the Snow
In “Mother in the Snow,” Georgia Shreve turns a winter stumble into a piercing portrait of maternal endurance under watchful eyes. Dark humor and raw imagery reveal a woman improvising her way forward while trying to hold dignity, and herself, together.
VIEW
Poetry
No Pity for Pigeons
In “No Pity for Pigeons,” Georgia Shreve transforms a quiet park encounter into a piercing social portrait of class, displacement, and human vulnerability. What begins with birds and cake ends with a deeper grief: not for pigeons, but for people quietly pushed to the margins of the worlds they once called ordinary.
VIEW
Poetry
You, we, I
In “You, We, I,” Shreve turns pronouns into emotional architecture, mapping how intimacy moves between fusion and fracture. With spare, incantatory lines, the poem captures two people reaching for truth through glare, innocence, and uncertainty, before landing on a haunting final shift from “we” back to “I.”
VIEW
Poetry
New Life
In “New Life,” Shreve imagines reinvention as metalwork: each day newly minted, each love a chance to re-stamp the self. Through images of repaired bridges, open doors, and an untouched bed, the poem captures the vulnerable mechanics of beginning again without denying what came before.
VIEW
Poetry
Is There a Poem in the House?
In “Is There a Poem in the House?”, Shreve turns inspiration into a haunting presence that seeps through walls, books, and breath before vanishing again. By merging domestic imagery with artistic dread, the poem captures the fragile cycle of creative arrival and loss with wit, unease, and precision.
VIEW
Poetry
Intimate Transmissions
In “Intimate Transmissions,” Shreve reimagines longing as signal and occupation, where desire arrives as pulse, implant, and interference rather than romance at a distance. Erotic, unsettling, and darkly funny, the poem traces how intimacy can slip from invitation into control while still feeling impossible to refuse.
VIEW
Poetry
Spotless
In “Spotless,” Shreve turns a household cleaning ritual into a darkly comic portrait of control, scrutiny, and emotional concealment. As the speaker prepares for an impossible inspector, the poem reveals that what gets hidden is not dirt but selfhood, ending on a chilling truth: one can be judged constantly and still remain unseen.
VIEW
Poetry
Foreign City
In “Foreign City,” Shreve transforms hometown streets into a brief dream of elsewhere, layering the ordinary with European aura, appetite, and cinematic glamour. The poem’s final turn, abrupt urban sound returning the speaker to Cleveland, reveals how quickly perception can mythologize place, and how suddenly reality reasserts its voice.
VIEW

Explore more works by Georgia

VIEW FEATURED WORK

Short Stories
The Countess of M—
In nineteenth-century France, a sheltered aristocratic daughter enters a secret romance with a fallen nobleman, discovering both the thrill of being chosen and the cost of defying the social order around her.
VIEW
Plays
The Odds
A darkly funny three-scene play about two sisters who grow up treating family dysfunction like a math problem. Ten years later, memory returns with teeth, and “the odds” becomes the name for what was hidden in plain sight.
VIEW
Short Stories
The Enigma Variations
In “The Enigma Variations,” a daughter chronicles her composer mother’s brilliance and unraveling as harassment, domestic pressure, and illness sever her from the piano that defines her life. Expansive, intimate, and devastating, the story is both elegy and indictment, revealing how a creative life can be erased long before death.
VIEW
Operas and Musicals
Enron
In “Enron,” Georgia Shreve turns corporate collapse into biting music-theater satire, following Carol Sidney as loyalty, ambition, and conscience collide. With sharp tonal shifts and escalating moral pressure, the work reveals how institutional fraud is sustained not by one villain, but by a culture of performance, fear, and strategic silence.
VIEW
Songs and Instrumental Music
Margaret
A Carnegie Hall-premiered (2010) and recorded (2010) tenor-and-piano setting of Hopkins’s “Spring and Fall,” "Margaret" transforms a child’s grief over autumn leaves into a spare, piercing meditation on mortality, memory, and the first knowledge of loss.
VIEW
Songs and Instrumental Music
Fantasia on Celtic Themes
Premiered at Carnegie Hall in 2015, "Fantasia on Celtic Themes" reworks traditional Celtic songs for soprano, tenor, and baritone, turning folk material into a cohesive dramatic journey of longing, love, and ritual memory.
VIEW
Songs and Instrumental Music
Easter 1916
In "Easter 1916," Georgia Shreve sets W.B. Yeats for soprano, tenor, baritone, and chamber orchestra, transforming a canonical political poem into a layered vocal drama of witness, grief, and historical change. Premiered at Weill Recital Hall, Carnegie Hall (May 2017), the work’s recurring refrain, “A terrible beauty is born,” evolves from observation into moral reckoning with each return.
VIEW
Multimedia Music
Four Seasons
In "Four Seasons" (2018), Georgia Shreve pairs her Piano Concerto with Halstead Wells’s time-lapse film of Manhattan terraces, transforming New York’s changing weather into a synchronized orchestral-visual journey. Premiered at Zankel Hall, Carnegie Hall, the work offers a lyrical study of urban beauty, temporal flux, and hard-won optimism.
VIEW

Inspired by Georgia’s Work?

 If her creativity moved you, let her know! Click below to send a message of appreciation directly to Georgia.
send your thanks