A Poem On A Monday

You know how the music you hear at a certain time in your life will forever be a monument and a reminder to that moment? Years later you hear that same song and it takes you right back there. And too, there's olfactory memory--in fact each of the 5 senses is a time machine. And every event in our lives that we remember through our senses marks us and maybe we carry those marks in our facial expressions, the movement of our bodies, our voice. That was the idea behind this poem.

What We Take With Us

Maybe the line of your lips in motion,

the way they part to say goodnight,

if frozen would echo that trip

you took to the ocean. The slower

you speak, the closer I see your figure

on the sand sitting with your back

to the States. Salt air and mist draw

your face and you draw it, out

to the curve where the water

seems so smooth and so unsafe.

Perhaps the way you sit on that beach

stems from your hour spent bow backed

on a bench beside a canal in Amsterdam,

when exhaust and fried onions hung in the air

over that conditioned river. You took

that posture with you when you left.

You have learned how to breathe by

walking the streets when it rains,

the pause you take between good

and night.

Is the reason why we can’t forget

because we hold everything in at

once? Like water, the way it

carries all of its own movement in

one place. The wave that rounded

a boat two nights ago, now arched,

then still for a second by your feet.

I see your feet were bare.

So forgiving, then, is jumping in

and sinking, and just as forcefully,

rising up for air.

Casey Lord