CALL ME BELOVED

day after day my thoughts fall upon this,
the subtle quickening of the years and
my fleeting memories of past ones, how
recollection doesn’t come easily, anymore.

despite this, I mysteriously find myself in the clutches
of a strange and unintelligable habit of collection –
carefully placed like trinkets in the cobwebbed corners of a drawer
I stow away seconds of memory, captured like film,
deliberately etched where they cannot be forgotten:
like that one cold february night, sitting in the front seat
warming my hands over the vents on your dashboard.
the roads were treacherous, you carefully drove in silence
and conversation didn’t come easily – watching your hands on the wheel
I thought to myself, like so many times before and yet to come,
you’re going to remember this moment forever.

the steel-like certainty of that thought must make it so,
because the memory surfaces quick and clear. I sit
and I write and I hold it up to the light like a negative,
placing my own significance because it offers me none.