Sunday, August 12, 2007

Thinking about the Past

Certain moments will never change, nor stop being--
My mother's face all smiles, all wrinkles soon;
The rock wall building, built, collapsed then, fallen;
Our upright loosening downward slowly out of tune--
All fixed into place now, all rhyming with each other.
That red--haired girl with wide mouth--Eleanor--
Forgotten thirty years--her freckled shoulders, hands.
The breast of Mary Something, freed from a white swimsuit,
Damp, sandy, warm; or Margery's, a small, caught bird--
Darkness they rise from, darkness they sink back toward.
O marvelous early cigarettes! O bitter smoke, Benton...
And Kenny in wartime whites, crisp, cocky,
Time a bow bent with his certain failure.
Dusks, dawns; waves; the ends of songs...

Donald Justice