something with roller skates or sherbet,
some memory culled from a childhood
in the Mohican woods of Ohio,
where my brother and I swung from vines
like young Tarzans, innocent of corporations
or collateral damage. But the war drags on
and tonight I find cheerfulness doubtful.
So I guess this poem will have to do,
although it contains no ripening orchards,
no laughing girls to stir the first bright dreams
of adolescence, not even an evening mist
to soften the end of the day.
We remember it differently, she and I.
That night we ate at Marie Callender’s
before the movie, shared a turkey pot pie.
I gave her roses. Afterwards, we argued,
some feminist point with no connection
to plot or character. At home, I found
the flowers sitting in the garbage, buds
just beginning to bloom.
Actually, she insists, we ate at Chili’s
that night, southwestern vegetable soup,
and the movie represented a typical
patriarchal perspective, and she placed
the flowers in the trash out of frustration
with my thickheadedness, always planned
to retrieve them.
Proust had it right: time mutates memory.
And who knows whose memory most
accurately reflects our actions, recorded
in those slippery spaces between synapses.
I can still taste the crust of that pot pie,
soft crunch of carrots and peas, still smell
the elusive aroma of that evening, steam
rising as my fork punctured that thin shell
and everything escaped.