On Remembering

[Written April 2007]

you will remember it differently
than i, you and your discrete units of time,
marked by the traffic of people
that arrive, and stay, and sometimes
stop to talk, or perhaps you remember
geographically, what is fixed
and what moves, where it moves,
what is comfortably still,
or perhaps you remember
in color, the absence of shadow,
the tables and chairs laid out
and remain constant like set pieces
in some theatrical play, day
after day without aging,
and all else is peripheral to you,
or perhaps you remember none of it at all,
while i brush away the images
of chairs and tables and people like annoying cobwebs,
leaving only a few knickknacks of memory,
and you've never noticed how
i try to sound more interesting, and
when i talk to you, i am part
nervousness, and all illusion
of confidence, and if i asked you,
"what color and shade
are my eyes," you would stammer
slightly and make a foolish
guess, but i, i can tell you
that sometimes when your eyes widen
just so, they are a luminosity in the darkness,
and then perhaps you would ask "how can light
penetrate black on black?" but i will tell you
that black has nuances too,
not just the paradox of absence, and
that sometimes when you're terribly excited,
the color is startlingly clear
and transparent like a mirror: these fragments
are important to me. i remember well.