Today
I thought I heard
A girl’s name, a month:
April.
And I was washed back in a tide of memory;
Trapped in an eddied past.
Remembering a girl once loved, now lost,
Fair hair and rain-blue eyes…
such sweet romantics, we laughed —
Our memories formed from passing moments;
Tea steeped in earthen mugs.
The days I lived then
Seem vague and Baudelarian,
In that period before the Spanish:
Christmas, 1934 was flooded by a river;
Christmas, 1935 a paper, sent three years earlier, arrived.
Time was not important then
Time is not so important now:
Faces half-seen through misted shopwindows
Can transport me across borders, across time
To the edges of memories rounded by much handling;
All the sharp edges rubbed smooth and comforting:
A beach-marked stone, as round as a life.