This month, I’m writing words and posting images relating to the landscape of memory. I hope to write poems most days and also share photos, quotes, and more prosaic thoughts related in some way to memory, nostalgia, longing for place, remembering and forgetting, landscape, dreamscape, landscape’s memory and memory’s landscape, the intersection of the layered historical physical world with personal memory, the frames that both landscape and memory use to contain and order our focus, the landscape of childhood, the landscape of devastation, how memories lie and tell the truth, the fragmentation of memory, how landscapes shape us and our memories, and so on. All the posts will be linked to the Introductory Page as they are posted. Thanks for visiting.

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Today, a poem.

Debris

Book in hand, pen, paper tucked inside,
across the terraced lawn — too small and self-conscious
for much but growing bees who sting our trampling feet
as they dismember, clover-blind and clover-hidden —
to the darkened brook beneath, running unaware,
both of us darkened and unaware, one of us leaping,
or sometimes stopping to probe the push of decay
and long-lost limbs of trees upstream, wondering do the trees
miss their limbs, pieces that once were tree and now are debris
and soon will merge again with soil,
then, one of us, picking a quiet path,
darting tiptoe trunk to trunk, pretending to evade
unseen eyes that watch or might be watching, seeking safety alone,
concealed, enclosed under the fragmented canopied sky, remembering
another woods behind another house,
the decaying log settled top to bottom, mushroom-scented,
bark disintegrating and irretrievable, scraping its edges along my skin,
the permanence of that touch, all but invisible.

©MMWms 2020

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A few brooks that aren’t the brook in the poem but could be.

and in the featured image, another brook in NH last summer.