A poet must discover that it’s his own story that is true, even if the truth is small indeed. - Jim Harrison

The memory
is the not-quite-living museum of our lives.
Sometimes its doors are insufferably wide open
with black stars in a grey sky, and horses
clattering in and out, our dead animals resting here
and there but often willing to come to life again
to greet us, parents and brothers and sisters sit
at the August table laughing while they eat twelve
fresh vegetables from the garden. Rivers, creeks, lakes
over which birds funnel like massive schools of minnows.
In memory the clocks have drowned themselves, leaving
time to the life spans of trees. The world of our lives
comes unbidden as night.

Everyone wishes a measure of mystery in their life that they have done nothing in particular to deserve.

I have always collected my thoughts on Sunday, a habit enforced in my childhood when my father gave up on the church and turned to my own education with an energy that must be called unpleasant.