poem 365 of a poem a day for 2012

grainy polaroid Autumn

my life is all objects nearer

the mirrors in the dark

I prefer to keep myself neatly in

the shoe boxes that I keep

filling with the mementos

of all my ancestral lives

they are upstairs and

I am climbing again

I turn the light on

and begin shuffling

around the attic

spying an old docksiders box

I sit down

and open it

there are movie tickets

in here when it was still fun

to be entertained

little cards from girlfriends

I’ve never forgotten

feeling their absence

in the clay pots

of these old photographs

I still have from those decades

when I didn’t need

some digital memory jack

to be understood

it was as if I already knew

I would grow to become

a ghost in the machines

of my own life

as if I knew that by

just touching them again

they could bring me

into potent sunshine

filtered through

the haze memory glazes

my aging with

I warm my bones

picking up these seeds

I’ve left behind

the tucked magic of vines

that trail guide

the days spent searching

for reminders

of who I am

who I used to be

who I could have been

once long ago

when all the pictures

that I took, I knew

would fade to yellow

like the maples leaves do

EJR ©