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.