leavings       a collection of left-over poems       John Bailey      

And, then, remembering

A prose poem

Watching a tape I'd made of an Allan Ginsberg memorial program I was excited by the showing and the words of the writers and the poets I now know that I did not know all those years ago. Why did I know of Ferlinghetti and not Snyder? Why of this and not of that?

And, associating, coming home from that edited sequence of dust speckled film clips and the drone-chant crowd-quenching giant Om, the words begin to form and ideas clot together like cream on the surface of standing milk and my childhood, even further back, comes alive in sparks and spots and anti-cerebral flashes of memory from times long left behind.

And, who wants to remember them? Who needs to know of the young men in uniform with their girls in the park on a sun-whitened summer afternoon when war was as far away for them as it was always so far away for me? Walking along with the crowds over the wooden bridge, past and under the sweet green-smelling mulberry tree beside the lake and along the river, across the shrieking stepping-stones, longing for lemonade and, always, always getting nothing more than tea?

And, who now can bring themselves to understand a world where the best of peace and safety was to sleep, half sleeping, half waking, wedged into a corner of a seat on the top deck of the trolley bus on the way home, thick with bitter tobacco smoke and the happy noise of people promising and dreaming of better things to come and knowing, child-safe, that nothing bad could happen while this journey lasted?

And, what importance now the lost-clock afternoons wandering the paths and tracks with school friends no more occupied than I, dreaming of jungles, tarzan-visited, lianas and tall trees between the cowslip, the old man's beard and the rampant, grape juice aroma of nettles too tall to trample?

And, constructing secret camps in unkempt corners of unwanted gardens where the shadows grew and unoccupied snail shells gathered dry and empty and shrimp flowers and their oily leaves made wholesome sweet scented quiet momentarily eternal cushions against the clay-red earth, who will associate with that memory now?

And, how to tell, how to explain the need to construct those secret safe places in a world that flickered cruel and explosive in the dark on cinema screens at the Granada and the County and the Plaza night after night after reality-escaping night when the bombs did not come to interrupt those monochrome dreams by the sirened descent into electric light bulb illuminated brick walled shelters lined with bunk beds, the air hazy and dank, cheerful voices laughing shrill: "Don't you know there's a war on, dearie?"

And, given the need, fishing the recovered memories from their long preservation isinglass deep in cool white enamel buckets far back on the larder floor like the eggs that were so precious, dark gold in their rubbery shells, where are the words to be found to recount them?

Somerset 1998

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