Instant nostalgia
This morning was green and gilt.
Hands this morning were art.
This night, late to make up my accounts, I sigh for it.
Poems on the topic: memory
Poems on the topic “memory” on Poets.by.
Miner
I bled red years in the mine.
I went out of the present, going back and back.
In my absence, the clock sang to my wife.
Selective Memory
This morning at home, looking over
the remains of our past:
where did I patch the house,
where did I paper?
Time Traveller
Now an old
consumptive man,
cold, kept to my bed
and overtaking
the sea in sleep,
I wake to
the first night
I lay with my wife.
In the past
Long past:
cold as a god of business.
Past of which I eat,
almost cloyed.
Past in our own feast,
the lock altered.
Peace time
A whole year goes
to the war with sand.
We remember one another
going to play house
and walk in the fields,
eat cheese-cake and enter
an hour’s ear.
Residual
Thirty years after the sudden death of someone I didn’t know terribly well, what remains? Not his name. Not quite his face, but something of his posture and physique. A strong impression of good-natured and thoughtful conviviality, based on possibly no more than half a dozen conversations, always on the periphery of punk shows. The shock and sadness of his death from a brain tumor. Someone who, on rare occasions when he pops into my head, still makes me smile, and shapes my memory of that whole period in my life. Good times. A good dude.
Wish I remembered his name.
fledgling cuckoo
flopping across the road
adoptive parents
nowhere to be found
poor little rain-crow
didn’t mean to be a parasite
Unforgetting
A year into the pandemic, do I still remember how to kiss, or even to hug? Is it a muscle-memory thing, like riding a bicycle? I’ve forgotten whole languages, one lonely drink at a time. I barely remember what it’s like to be in a room full of strangers. Will we ever pretend that’s normal again?
last year’s pod
still holding on
to next year’s milkweed
The Hollow (18)
ghostly dock leaves
pressed against the window
old chicken house
gone but for their grins
our childhood collection
of mummified rats
once my best
climbing teacher
broken-limbed maple
stone wall
all the times
I’ve rebuilt it
Effigies
Clouds hide the top of Ice Mountain
and it looks like a real mountain again,
no turbines in sight.
Below, the ugly subdivision
where a black family once woke
to a burning cross.
I find a shed antler on the powerline,
a twisted Y like the bottom half
of a stick figure.
Death of the Author
A small pin-striped bird alights
on the dead cherry tree next to the porch
& starts gleaning its breakfast
from crevasses in the decaying wood.
At length I remember its name,
black-and-white warbler—
& in so doing, forget the name of the author
whose Collected Shorter Poems I hold
in my lap. They’re orphaned for more
than a minute by my poor memory.
If I can just get the first letter…
something beginning with a G, perhaps?
That letter like a smile
warped into a grimace…
Or a T, that tall gallows.
The warbler stops to issue his usual
Secret Santa
In dark December, sink
into the memory of childhood
like a bog man into the peat.
Drink too much & sing.
Gather all your small griefs,
your long-bearded regrets
& grotesque humiliations,
dress them in red & set
them to hammering. This is
the season of fresh starts
& the slaughter of innocents.
Remember to cut air holes
in the top crust & don’t stint
on butter. Wear sensible boots.
Go out into the long night
& learn the names of the stars.
Describe a feeling — we’ll find a poem
Or try: