Tag: Memories

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Distraction

Last weekend an old friend of my age
plunked his pill jar down on the brunch table
and proclaimed astutely that without
medical science he wouldn’t be there
to enjoy the free-range egg omelet
and crisped smoked bacon I served him.

Last night, thanks to Netflix, I took in two
noirs which I would never have been able, let
alone be allowed to see in the ringworm-ridden
movie houses of my boyhood. Planes, then,
had propellers. They flew just above the clouds.
Girls got pregnant. Boys fought with their fathers.

None of this makes any difference now – neither
last night nor this morning. No one uses cash or
thinks of change for phones. Things that mattered
then stayed off-stage. I need to remember to dim
the digital clock and make sure I haven’t
inadvertently set it for some wrong hour.

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Before Dawn

Early or late you woke
to revive the waning fire.
Numb asleep I still could hear

splinter the shingle you broke,
against closed lids see flare
the flash as kindling took.

I was roused by sleight
and saw, crouching in a nimbus
of flame stirred up from embers

a sylph afire, a sprite,
the camber of your members
bathed in amber light.

***
No foreboding of separation here, so this is not an alba by the strict rules of that old Provençal genre. Also, its setting is predawn, the light pictured therein emerging from an open stove rather than through a window.

Such internally rhymed poems were unfashionable in the early 80s when the cult of sincerity ruled and artifice was shunned, as if the two qualities are contradictory. This little song was sent forth to multiple literary journals, to no avail.  At one point it fell to serve as tinder in another fire as I passed through a periodic purge of my vanities. Fortunately, I retrieved it from an old typescript I had lost track of and can now revive the moment of incipient desire it celebrated. As we approach the end all we have is vanities, maybe all that memories are.