Musings

[Another lost snippet from the deep recesses of my hard drive, to commemorate further 100 Days of Nostalgia. This is a poem I wrote nearly eight years ago. I'm not a poet.]

The Hometown Museum

Stepping into the home of my youth
I marvel how the furniture’s changed.
This is the feeling of visiting museums,
snickering at the shrunken chairs of our ancestors.
“A primitive, distant race,” we assure ourselves.
“Nothing like us.”

Speaking with my mother over coffee,
I look for the zippered rent in time’s fabric
That I must have fallen through to end up here:
Foreign at the table where I once drank morning’s milk.
This is different somehow, it’s alternate.
She never wore her hair that way.

I part from the wax figure before me with thanks.
Me, flesh and movement, trying to step from
peculiar still life and move away forward.
But dust motes drift in the air of this exhibition.
There is animation here.
People clink knives against plates at this table, and
a living man sleeps in my father’s bed,
His hoary breathing a pulse in the walls I would see still.