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 poem.

*

Unfolding

The day unfolds like butter, soft and warm, delicate.
It’s winter white outside but the day is open
like the salty green sea, like a golden grassy marsh,
a beige beach of shards and smooth rocks,
an expanse of time that feels endless and milky,
something to lap up and curl around.
It unfolds moment by moment, no moment opening
before it’s ready. I cook a simple breakfast,
pushing rice and sprouts around with a plain wooden spatula,
sip the cherry blossom tea, consider the morning.
The day remains unresolved, I am unresolved like the foggy shore,
the land extending into the silky morning mist, the remembered view
not yet in focus. I am alone, I’m always alone,
even when you’re with me. The cat is with me,
each of us alone, stretching, slowly lapping up
the milky day as it spreads out, rises and falls,
seasonal and ordinary, the lingering moon waiting.

©MMWms 2020

*

Featured image: Popham Beach, Phippsburg, ME, June 2008