Can you be patient with your memories? I mean, is there time enough? You can push one away for years, only to find, when you’re ready for it, that it’s lost its presence, fading into a denatured place “in which world and flesh / pull taut against each other / enough to allow / erosion.” In this sharp, haunting sequence of poems I feel like G. L. Ford is charting memory’s insistent dwindling, “like an alphabet / shedding letters,” marked throughout by dispatches from Gilgamesh’s half-beast best friend, who might find our present world “itself a judgment / on our faltering and / bestial sympathies, or not / bestial enough.” Ford’s got a wonderful, decisive ear and a deft touch. These gorgeous poems emerge like songs from the flicker between slides in the old slideshow.