Mnemonic

At nine, a teacher taught
me this trick, “You
can remember
‘dessert’ has two
esses, because
you always want
two.” And I remember
but I always only want
one. My memory
of it is for the desert’s
sweet-strict beauty
unjust deserts.

When the stories I tell can change me, I tell them over again

There are three kinds of memory I’d provocatively tell myself if I knew which self to provoke and the provocative part isn’t what they are so much as who they make me There are the personal memories of course like that one of an early crawl with small fingers tugging at shaggy browns as they make for the Siamese who lies purring grays a world away Or another hand much bigger but less sure The temptation this time is maybe hers sitting close but distant and yet it’s more likely mine and where my hand wants to lie and how it wants me to keep it there forever I have to tell it its forever is longer than mine These memories are an always too slippery to hold and I've always let them go where they will There are also cultural memories the kind with lives and lessons they’ve unkindly kept in books but their lessons don’t live within the bindings clapped down with dust to lessen them They escape with each crack and they tiptoe their stories inside me Their stories that root and rise an idyllic garden leafing lush greens with one forbidden tree I’ve bitten its fruit and it's opened my eyes I’ve re-opened them often and what I see changes and I see in these changes there’s a third kind It’s kept deeper Deeper still Too deep to read or know well It’s written within each cell and it tells the same tales with a different head This head much hairier peeks between dense branches at reds suddenly grown sharper and it peeks for me A snake that can’t be so easily hid.

Small revelations need no deathbed

considering how
I watch a considerable number of films
at least one most days
when those days aren’t too demanding
though the films mostly are
confined to my laptop screen
trips out to the theater being savorably rare occasions
it’s not a complete surprise
I might jumble things
now and again or is it then
misgiving an actor’s given name
transposing disposable plot points
but how could I confuse a film’s coloring
and transport its content to a another continent and time
first I should retrace my missteps
worst foot forward back to the trailer I see-saw
hyphens mask bigger blanks than I imagined
I remember paying half my mind to coming attractions
coming too many before a full-priced feature
I’d rarely occasioned out to see
some do come to attract my attention
it began with a pretty girl
they pretty much always do
she waltzed through frames clearly drained to black-and-white
then the same girl still pretty sitting atop a horse-drawn waggon
it put an older period to the piece’s full-stop
hop skip and jump a week
later to a movie reviewed on crisp pages
I hold up against my dog- eared mental note
its flap obscuring all but the letter W
deduction is a wonderfully productive art
agile assumptions can work the nimblest tricks
but my convenient leaps inelegantly escaped a niggling
dissonance to connect this pair of widely ranging narrow dots
a girl and a jagged shape
it’s how I came to mistake Winter's Bone for White Ribbon
months later I’d see the error of my daze gone by
and this stubborn pig of a world with all its pigments restored.