One Day

Water falling on dirt: sound and texture. 
Words fail to describe how the sky longs 
for the sun, how the birds are voiceless.

My Granddad used to say, “There is 
nothing that cannot be said,” but even
that is not said anymore, dead these 
24 years and the better off for it.

What comes next must be a childhood 
memory of Spring when the nights were 
thick and dark, lit dimly only by stars, 
and the town was smaller, laboring 
beneath the deep hoarseness of a 
northeast wind with a taste of salt and 
metal howling down from Canada and 
skipping like a stone across the Great 
Lakes, only to push against this house 
and rattle my bedroom windows. 

Somewhere in the distance there is a 
train, rather, there are trains and there 
are great tankers on the lake.

A chief element of memories is tenacity. 

Memories are as tenacious as a dog 
digging at an old bone and when they 
drop themselves at your feet, you blink 
your eyes and shake your head and then 
bring them to focus as if you were 
brushing dust off shards of ancient 
pottery that has long forgotten what 
it looked like when it was whole.

Sometimes memories are locked doors
without keys, unopened books in 
languages we cannot read, bleached 
survivors of a perennial storm of 
forgetfulness, faces perpetually rebuilt 
from last night’s dreams, bodies 
fashioned from baling wire and 
Styrofoam, their angles and attitudes 
curated, set down in precise and seemly 
environments like the ziggurats of 
Ninevah or office towers in New York

Once upon a time, I had a vision where I 
harnessed the memory of your face to a 
team of wild horses, then drove them 
across a dark field of forgotten dreams 
strewn with artifacts of a desperate 
archeology beneath a full moon 
glistening like an eye full of tears.

I awoke in my bedroom, on the floor
naked and alone, shivering, a striped
horse blanket draped across my shoulders,
damp with sweat and tears.