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.

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Living Room

He came to me in a dream to tell me a story:
He was with a girl, going to see a house.
She told him, before they went in:
my parents’ living room furniture wouldn’t fit
in that living room.
He said, of course it would. That living room
could hold twice your parents’ living room.
They hadn’t yet seen the living room.
They went into the house.
Her parents’ exact living room
furniture, every piece the same,
sat comfortably in that living room.
See? she turned to him and said.
See? I told you it wouldn’t fit.
They were eight years old.

I looked at this dream when I awoke,
curious, turning it over, checking
all sides of it to be sure.
I laughed when I recognised her,
still visiting me in the time of dreams
to tell me that it’s not how it looks
but how it feels, and that if you don’t feel
there’s room for you to live here
in your established, furnished life,
so spacious and so fitting,
you’re right.

©MMWms 2020

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Featured photo: girl on a sofa, 1968