telephone rings past
the usual solicitor hour despite
their ever-present audacity.
I pick up instead of screening
through the answering machine.

My friends tells me, on this calm night,
full of bright stars and blinks of planes,
he tells me, as I half listen, he
tells me, the window pane is
cold, he tell me he is plagued
by memory.

Memory?

All are troubled, I told him, by memory.
I still can't take Tylenol. After all these years,
first word off my tongue: cyanide.

He was born in 1981. He does not remember. Nor
when Pope John Paul II was shot, I was
in a Dayton-Hudsons in Columbus, Ohio.

Not like that, he says. Perfect memory. So
perfect that the green leaf on a particular tree will
remind me of the same hue and shade of the hat that Kathy
wore the first time we...

I interrupted, knowing indeed in my memory how
long the story was and how many times he'd told it.

I threw out words like eidetic
and told him to read Funes or Fumes
or whatever that Borges story is called,
it's October, it's getting colder, and
you'll have plenty of timeto read,
told him Dali didn't paint spineless
clocks in fields of sand and call it
Persistence of Memory
on a double-dog-dare.

Not that I helped him any.

But what could I say for cheer
when the cold window pane on my fingertips
made me think of the crystal
patterns formed by my breath
and hers
on a cold cafe
window over eight years ago?

And today, while stopped at a traffic light,
the tall dying grass by the roadside reminds me
of the wildflowers I once
picked for her
in July?