~JEFF NEWBERRY~

PANTOUM ON A LINE BY WELDON KEES

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          for Heather Marie
 

Memory of summer is winter's consciousness.
Wind blows from the north smelling of spring
forgotten.  Black smoke from burning trash
fills the sky like a dream, a narrative of the past.

Wind blows from the north smelling of spring,
but fading, a kind of wistful and selfish nostalgia
filling the wind with dreams and narratives of past
times, when the winter was only a dream, a fantasy.

Fading in and out of selfish memory and nostalgia,
I remember the summer and spring, those shadow-
lengthening days when winter was only fantasy
and the world crackled at the edges, kinetic, alive.

Remembering summer and spring and shadows
at night, I think eventually of you: our long talks
as the sky cracked at dusk as stars appeared, alive
against the still-growing sky, lightly lucent

as evening came, as it must eventually, and our talk
would end before its time, and I held you with my eyes
while the sky faded to a pale moon glow, the shining
ghostly, translucent, the light still against the night.

My memory ends suddenly, before its time, my eyes
watering and stinging from the wind, the smoke, the air.
Above me, the sky stretches out like a story of the past:
Memory of summer is winter's consciousness.

© by Jeff Newberry