Memories

Memories give us amnesia
about what we could know:
spooks telling truths
in cunningly coy
closed, secret sessions.

They wrap us in myths,
conjuring dreamy, alluring
vapid mirages
                         which may guide us-
                         beguiling as
                         stars in the distance
while receding further, further
as we approach.

Memories shatter moments
of fragile truth, (unwillingly)
drawing us
irresistibly, to their
tinseled cocoons.

They corrode love’s
fresh childish rapture with
sugar and rust
syrup and dust.

Memories lock us in
windowless rooms
as we stare longingly at
faded, curling photographs
of the way
we once wished
we once dreamed
we might have been,
but may never know-
for haunted oldness coats
new moments like thick, black grease.

Now forget all this
and peel open your heart.

I wasn’t too happy when I wrote this. I had been rejected by a long term lover. But it has a certain bitter truth to it about clinging to the past.

For what it’s worth, there are 15 tracks mixed here. 1 clarinetist improvising to repeated Robin calls, American Robin quarter speed, White Crowned Sparrow, Carolina Chickadee, Acorns dropping on my roof. Sooty Shearwater bird calls, Japanese Winter Wren, and Sage Thrasher at 64 and 128 slowed down speeds. Enjoy!

I haven’t posted here in a long, long time. Most of my attention is now devoted to writing for my professional clarinet blog, The Buzzing Reed. DavidHThomas.net

Sometimes I just want to write something non-clarinet or music oriented.

My parents are miraculously still alive. My mother is 88, and my father is 83.

Each is declining in their own special way, with moments of breakthroughs mixed with the general trend toward the end of their lives.

I also have a cat named Punker, who is 20 in September. I cannot imagine him going. He has been with me for almost half my life. I raised him as a pre-weened kitten, only one week old. His mother died of toxemia because she had another baby inside her which did not birth.

I had to bottle feed Punker with a special kitten milk. I also had to rub his tummy (to simulate the mother licking him) to stimulate his urine to go, and eventually, to encourage a bowel movement!!

I don’t want to write the whole story now, because it’s midnight, and I need to eat (dinner) and go to bed. But I’ll post more about Punker’s wonderful life in the next few weeks.

David Thomas (aka Garnet)