Memento Mori

Like cormorant wings, when the phone book opened
on my lap - riddled with flea-shaped letters -
the way backs of my hands are
marked with liver spots,

I thought: Now. This time
everything will cycle back.
The mechanic who ordered strawberries from
Tel Aviv, perhaps the Finnish whose family album held

snapshots of Sahara sand dunes. Every number could
be a thread, a gretel stone that leads back to
some tale, like waking up with
a certainty it's Wednesday.

So it might very well be
the used-car salesman - all
expired warrantees and balding - that rouses,
not a desire to shut the door, but to closely examine
the glove compartment of an old Ford I don't recall buying
despite my signature on the contract; and why,
if I keep reciting last names
out loud, I am more

likely to remember
where the dream in the fish belly
stopped that night a policeman took me home,
than to go on biting my nails raw over a familiar face I saw

across the street, is something only my doctor understands.
However, when I found a pressed leaf, a milk receipt,
a bingo card - in my pocket -
or a glass giraffe

on the shoe rack,
it seemed these were messages
I left for myself and, from these inanimate objects, that I knew even then something was wrong with my mind.

~

words: Arlene Ang, Italy ( & other ways to talk to myself )
image: Smitha Murthy, India (Life Wordsmith)

~

a distant remembering: Sifted Particles