MEMORY
I see faded books and yellow pages.
Dust covered nooks and wide cracks
Where planks meet.
Two wooden shelves
Serve as cupboards
As well as for roach defecation
Sprinklings of tiny specks
Mating grounds.
And metal drums four
For dining table, rough planks suspended
Some criss crossing
Broken chairs
Four mismatched
One downturned,
A Tin drum.
A spider here and webs long abandoned there
I smell ointment and see a bottle filled with brown herb
Rue, pungent herb, submerged in a amber liquid
Nothing else enters my young mind here,
Just quiet,
The smell of dust, desiccated wood planks for floorboards
Felled a hundred years ago to make a shack.
The creak of my mother walking across this floor
She glues spanish pages from a Mexican tabloid
Back to black white stove, enamel chipped
For pot of hot water flour mix, homemade glue
Brown knots and companion holes
Cover planks gaps between to eavesdrop
In room across
Containing metal drums too
Wood planks too criss cross
For springs to bed
Dingy grey white ancient old
Yellow stained
Ancient urine dried
Pungent smells mixed with ointments
This remote shack in San Joaquin valley
Was mine a rough 59 earth cycles ago
I remember, almost forget
Parts of where I came from
My memory was young then
Almost forget, but still remember vivid
Much of our existence involves simple states of mind
Interdimensional realities
I ponder these things
In a different dimension again,
Sitting in a Fresno parking lot
Waiting at the threshold
Of another memory
The shack is gone
Rough 45 miles west off Nees
Torn down
But its mother shack
Still stands
If shacks could talk
I would go back
And walk about
Listen for its voice
And of its offspring
Other shacks besides our own
Ghosts, voices
Sounding through the leaves of dusk covered tamarisk trees
In that Mexican labor camp
Brought back by the ethereal magic
Called imagination.
Memory and it’s making
Without video tape or Kodak celluloid technology
Memory residing in a thing called brain
Or spirit
Memory - my life,
All contained, replayed at the touch
Of time
To sit and reflect and ponder
Dimensions lived and yet to live
Unpredictable
Integrated with yours
Who kindly challenged me to
Remember
Thank you for asking Prose Poster,
Otherwise this Moment
Would have passed unrecorded.