Thursday, November 02, 2006

Poem: Photographic Memory

(Yes, the art I'm doing is mostly word-art so far. There may be photography or other stuff later - I don't know. I went for a broad definition, as it increases the odds I'll keep doing this.... :)

(I hope this is decent. I make no promises: I just rattled it off tonight as, due to various unrelated complications, most of my evening got eaten up.)

Photographic memory

There's a blackberry where the flower bed used to be.
It is mounded, a weed, a menace, its thorns
waiting for the unwary to pass it. Somewhere beneath
there were the brilliant, sturdy pink blooms
of my childhood. Beside them the delicate necks
of columbines, trumpets waiting for the sky
to sip them. The old stump of the tree we never saw,
already cut down when my parents bought the place.
The stump was destroyed and hauled away.
The columbines died. Eventaully even the pinks died,
choked out by the blackberries. My parents still live
in that house, by that blackberry, the rosebush sprawling
and huge, the silver lace vine climbing in a wild tangle
up and along its trellis - as if in their later years
they have given into the impulse of teenagers,
to run wild, to let the world run wild again.
Somewhere, somewhere I remember a neatness
and an order, straight lines and log fences. Clean.
Deceptive: there was always something wild there,
the feral cats, the thorns, the fields gone to seed.
How easily the memory makes such things turn to
ordered rows, pretty flowers. How easily the parts
that didn't fit are cut from the photographs.

3 comments:

Leah said...

this is a gorgeous poem, vivid and rich. great work.

i'm glad you're going with whatever will keep you going. poems are art. your words created whole paintings in my mind!

Anonymous said...

This is beautiful, the thorns and the flowers, the misty thoughts of childhood. Sometimes the poetry just flows - and it obviously did here.

Anonymous said...

I like this, too. Especially the berry bushes overgrowing the other plants.