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.

Today, a silly one pulled from early memories.

Fishy

Now I wonder whether my insatiable longing
for the sea began with a simple lullaby,
the only one I remember my mother singing,
that lilting tune about child servitude and early death:
she wheels her wheelbarrow,
through the streets broad and narrow,
crying cockles and mussels,
alive alive-o

Or was it fourth grade speech class,
my lisp wrapping its addled tongue
and my brain its incipient skepticism
around the poor business model of
selling seashells by the seashore, where
the primary commodity is, at a glance, seashells?

I mean, given my early indoctrination,
I might have become an underage fishmonger
without giving it another thought.
But that boat has sailed, and
now live cockles and mussels
to say nothing of uninhabited seashells
are far from my landlocked garden wheelbarrow,
wheeled by my youthful ghost, piteously crying
I slit a sheet, a sheet I slit. Upon the slitted sheet I sit,
or something suspiciously close.

©MMWms 2020

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