Memory,
the planted seeds of future work.
Those moments of mystery and violence
seared into childhood innocence.
In the rows of cross country cornfields
intersecting on the empty plains of thought.
You’re the point of entry
for these stalks on all sides,
until growing overhead,
you were not able to process it yet.
When what housed creativity
was merely a foundation,
fear is the forgotten masonry
that builds fascination.
Mystery,
those luminous garments
you’ll salvage from dark closets
to give form to again.
At Dungeon rock you keep digging,
finding only madness and subterranean water,
not realizing where the gold resides,
on the tips of the trees that line Cornel path.
Violence always had it’s place on the knife’s edge of time.
In old Kung Fu films and in the technicolored gaze
of Medusa’s severed head,
you were transfixed to the red
that emblazoned the cars of elevated trains.
From the Bronx to Coney Island
your imagination placed supreme significance
in the division of neighborhoods into gang turf,
written dimensions on a prized and ripped map.
By middle school a fear and fascination with death
found you staring out the windows
at long black hearses
ushering in St. Pius funerals.
There was no longer the safety of naivete,
friends lost parents, people got cancer,
a heart attack took Nonna
and the small panic you’ll always remember,
phone calls that announce a stranger
penetrating that tiny world.
All these recollections
sticking like mud at low tide.
Osgood eyes wet, keen on distant birds,
deciphered as spirit in the wavering trees
and in the dreamscape of the sky.
The ocean always returns to childhood
in the scent of salt marsh,
it marches back in time
to the music tangled in the cellar wires,
memories in the decay of seaweed at Derby Wharf
where all the layers overlap and you can read
the barnacled marks when it recedes.
Out from under the shadow’s thumbprint,
you’re the exposed rock of Chocorua awaiting a storm,
you’re Waterman seeking a nook on Lafayette Ridge,
Brailsford on a weighted line in Cormorant shade,
Cochran still unsolved in the fog of Swampscott.
What breaks the silence?
What moves the instrument and goes beyond science ?
Was it violence creeping in the telepathic underground?
Tripping the wires to access
the haunted tape loop of the mind?
The sudden screetch of trolley cars
collides with Garbarek’s sublime choir,
as if the bloodied petals off of Pulcherrima’s rose
were left scattered on the tracks.
You were there at the intersection
watching the passing of the rails,
standing over these remains
to note the juxtaposition
that holds unspoken significance
to what you have yet to transform into words.
yakskinpocketnotes 