From Inside the Aquarium
If you stood inside your memories,
and looked out at yourself,
here is what you would see:
small figure at the end
of a long hall,
squinting through the fog
chalkdusting the air.
After a while, you’d forget
what you were looking at
but you’d still look
for a minute
while the colors moved.
I want to revisit this one, but I like it a lot right now. Our memories forget us--once again, you put us in our place, and I like that. The opening proposition alone is a fascinating idea, very much worth a poem--or a dissertation in philosophy or psychology. And to think of the "answer" to the opening question as colored chalk dust shifting--well, that's pretty darn good. We see nothing clearly in memory, yet we make major decisions based, largely, on memories of past events. It's troubling, but that's what such an "answer" in such a state of being needs to be.
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