Memory, in Anne Scott Musil's poem, is less a photo album than a whole ecosystem. Across its lines the mind becomes a sea, a jungle, a marsh, a glass house, a forest, and the poem asks whether two people can ever really walk through each other's version of it. Its answer, delivered in the last two lines, is quietly sad: "in our mind's forests we / never repeat never / quite meet."
The opening sets up the idea of a shared inner world, and the first phrase is a good example of the poem's method. "Our mind-sea foggy clear" has no punctuation to tell us whether the sea is foggy *and* clear or somewhere between the two. Memory is both at once. Beneath the surface swim "scaled creatures" that turn into "twisting turning movies," so the images that surface are half animal, half film. Then comes a jolt: "crusaders' flaming crosses / pitiless in 'faith'." The scare quotes around *faith* show the speaker judging a cruelty that nonetheless belongs to her. It is "as much a part of me as this treed / half-raked lawn." That comparison is the poem's first real surprise. Violence and a half-finished garden chore are given the same weight, as if the mind makes no distinction between the monstrous and the mundane.
The second stanza turns to "you," whose memories are "armies images / wrapped in your bones." The sea is shared, yet each person carries private stock. The attic image, with its "cast-off / gowns and gestures," fits this well, because an attic is where things are stored out of sight and not quite thrown away. The stanza ends on the poem's darkest note, "so many loves and knives / lie buried." Putting loves and knives in one phrase, with nothing to separate them, suggests that intimacy and injury are stored side by side.
Musil keeps changing the setting. After the sea comes a marsh "teeming / humming eyes wings flapping / tadpoles herons," and the crowded, noisy line copies the crowding it describes. Then come "scrubbed rooms" where memories are "careful ordered," a deliberate contrast with the marsh. The speaker's hesitation is plain here: "I don't want / to enter anyone or be entered." The line break after "want" makes the reluctance visible. Yet she adds that she is "embarrassed at some rooms / but nothing's lost," a phrase that reads as both comfort and warning, since nothing being lost also means nothing can be forgotten.
The poem's most striking passage is the house of glass. "My house is glass / we share a passageway," she writes, and what travels along that passage is smell: "incense cabbage garbage / perfume excrement dog skunks." The list has no commas, so the sacred, the domestic, the sweet and the foul run together at the same speed. Sound helps the effect, with the hard, clustered consonants of "cabbage garbage" and the soft hiss of "incense" and "perfume." Closeness, the poem implies, is not tidy. To share a life is to share its odours.
Rhyme is absent, and so are most conventional markers of rhythm. Lines are short and uneven, enjambment pushes the reader down the page, and pairs like "twisting turning," "teeming humming" and "careful ordered" give the language a pulse without a fixed beat. The pronouns also carry the argument: "our" and "we" dominate early, and "you" and "I" slowly separate until the last lines pull the pair back into a plural that is at once shared ("our mind's forests") and divided ("never quite meet").
The poem is significant because it refuses to flatter memory or companionship. A more sentimental poem would let two people merge through shared recollection. Musil lets them live in glass houses and pass each other in the trees, close enough to catch each other's smells and images but never to overlap completely. The final repetition of "never," with its small stumble before "quite meet," leaves the reader with that near-miss, which is a more honest picture of closeness than most poems offer.