Returning, Sonnet #613

How many remember so much?

I’ve read for some it’s a burden,

That not a thought or word or touch

Is lost, faded or uncertain.

All comes back clear and unbidden,

A constant stream of images

It is prayed might remain hidden.

No, such a past never ages.

The old yew tree in my back yard,

Subsiding, has dug a sinkhole,

Its roots drawing earth to branches.

I fill it in with sand —it’s hard—

I don’t want to choke the tree’s bole

Just to slow small avalanches.

Carpet of Memory 2 (Paul Klee), Sonnet #537

“Flying carpet” might be more apt,

Fleeing, unreachable, rapt.

Not magical, but uncanny,

Not even real, epiphany

Without a point because it is

Not up to analysis.

We’re given only a number —

How many can’t be counted, known —

(Fraying threads, fabric unsewn).

“I’m certain that I remember,”

I say. The carpet flaps. I fall.

Can I recall one thing at all?

The memories that I most fear

Are those I hope to lose next year.

My book of the first 200 of these sonnets is now available for purchase. Click here: My Human Disguise. 

No Image (Memory), Sonnet #473

An insomniac, I wake, remember

My life in vivid, unchosen eras,

(Not so much the fly but the amber),

All real, rediscovered chimeras.

Often it’s place that sets the revery,

What happened each day when I lived somewhere

Decades ago. Names and faces vary

From what they are today to what they were.

Like swimming, eyes open, under water,

A certain fearlessness is required —

At any time the vision can falter,

The eyes go blind or sting, become mirrored.

I can choose a time, but sometimes it’s blank,

Then my eyes water and I blink and blink.

Carpet of Memory (Klee), Sonnet #369

No one has a first memory, not one.

We can so designate any we choose,

The dimmest, the least associative,

A parent’s kiss or a promise undone,

The smell of mother’s milk, a game we lose,

But not that first moment we know we live.

For then they propagate like dry grasses

In a desert, patches of green, some sweet,

Some blown, or desiccated cactuses —

All ungraspable, too desired, too fleet.

I choose my first — not a moment, a dream:

“Wendy” and I are threatened by an ape.

She wears a witch’s hat and I a cape.

Then all fades away in a moon’s blank beam.