White Mules and a Column of Smoke
I am thinking of a place I’ve never seen or visited,
much like Heaven or Jot ‘Em Down, Texas, but with better
beverages and the advantage of hindsight and seasoning,
a glance back or to the peripheral, with a side of memory
and sliced, pickled jalapeños topping a pile of imagination.
And how do we so clearly remember what never occurred?
That book I read in 1970 was first published three years
later. A drowned childhood acquaintance ordered a beer
and sat next to me at a party in college. The open fields
I recall from the garden walls in France, where homes stood.
If only we carried with us slide shows or grooved vinyl
to trace back our lives – photos and recordings of those daily
remembrances – detailed notes indexed on cards, or data
embedded in our palms and accessed by eye twitches.
Would such evidence improve our lives?
Which filters shutter moments and thoughts, twist them
into balloon animals we no longer recognize? False
accusations and convictions aside, can we trust what we
know to be true? That oak stands where it has for four
decades. I bleed when cut. The sky still leers above us.
“White Mules and a Column of Smoke” was drafted during the August 2016 Tupelo Press 30/30 challenge. I am grateful to Natalie Butler, who sponsored the poem and whose photo inspired me.
O at the Edges 
Wonderful – interesting to read “And how do we so clearly remember what never occurred?” relative to current conversations with my son (almost 46) about his teen years. We recall things differently, though we were both present. What really did occur? And more curious – what are neither of us recalling that might clarify the variances? [I did not start daily journaling until after his teen years – no track record. Not that I could trust a journal reflection to match “reality”!]
LikeLiked by 1 person
I have some vivid false memories about innocuous events. One is a memory of checking out a particular book from the public library in 1970, three years before it was published…
LikeLiked by 1 person
This is one I missed during the Tupelo challenge and I love it, especially that second stanza. Increasingly, I find it comforting to never be sure of my memories, because if I can be wrong about so many things, there’s a chance I might have been a marginally less terrible young person than I thought I was. ^_^
LikeLiked by 1 person
Memories seem to be fluid in accuracy. And yes, there are some that I wish had never happened. And maybe they didn’t. 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person