On Memory

It begins with a flash:

I stepped on the shattered plastic of a cheap gum ball dispenser

It lay at the foot of a Silver Maple in my the back yard of my childhood,

With a great, wide base

And roots that grew certainly

With the naive permanence of childhood.

It expands to a space:

A shed, a sickly Red Maple, a juvenile Pin Oak.

No tree unclimbed,

No fear uncalculated.

I jumped from the roof of that shed a hundred times,

Knowing even then that I fell with the graceful lightness of youth. 

It ends with people:

A retired neighbor, planting banana peppers behind the white fence,

His grandson, a wiffle ball mate,

Legions of ghost runners,

Zacharies, Zacharies, Zacharies!

And their endless He-Men and Skeletors!

It lingers:

The sickly tree is gone.

The action figures packed away.

My knees too weak and my body too fat for a fall of ten feet.

And the neighbors, too, are gone, all of them.

But their houses remain, like this.