Word Count:168
“Then there lives within us not a memory of history but a memory of the cosmos. Times when nothing happened come back.” (Bachelard, 119)
“The pure memory has no date. It has a season.” (Bachelard, 116)
“a whole vanished universe is preserved by an odor.” (Bachelard)
*The poems correspond in order of the three quotes.
1)
the eruptions
of reverie,
the micro-pulsations,
cause our skin
to dream
of a time
when nothing
happened.
2)
I slip between a time of now and when
the days light lasted long into the night,
and the sun broke apart and scattered
across the sky and everything was possible
and nothing was done in the thick heat
of my body sticky with pollen and petals,
and the tangy earth-like sweetness of my
humid skin stretched over lazy summer
bones.
3)
This house is old. I smell its old age in the cobwebbed history of its bones (old books, sun bleached photos, antique furniture, dusty wood, empty dresser drawers, lavender, loose wall paper). It holds a heat that warms the deepest part of me, a part of that pulsing piece thats hidden between my spine and rib cage. The cotton bub breeze carries traces of river and moves through lace curtains and through my mind, kicking up forgotten feelings, suspending me in this moment of pure memory.