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Memory Screen

Andrew H. Oerke

The window that had cataracts of frost on it
can see when you rub on it and then it’s clear
until your breath coats the transparency sheath once more.

I can still close my eyes and Mulligan back
to those times at the leafy tailspin end of autumn when
I climbed into the rowboat and stitched the ruffles of waves
together in the wake after the prow scissored the waffling
reflections apart, and I am still a kid huddled
in my heart’s old projection booth, the celluloid
creaking and cranking away as if the reel were read
but would need splicing at any moment and then
the spell would be broken and the bubble’d burst;
or maybe the bubble’d swell & crisp to the crystal ball
I imagine I’m now in as in a paperweight looking out
at the crazy little kid looking in at what he’s become,
and which one of us is more here & now I wonder.

The boy gives the glass globe a good shake to see if the snowflakes
might fall in more fortunate fashion for a finer fate
this time. No such luck; it’s only me
when I thought I might mutate like a fruit fly
under evolution’s fortuitous microscope so fine-focused,
or inside God’s lunar telescope just for the hell of it,
but here I am in the same old crystal bauble of NOW
and the future of myself is still myself and me
thinking I’m still a kid trying to go home again
in this old shabbyshack shelter of a poem.

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