Memory is the house next door.
The large house that keeps changing.
Neighbors moving in and out.
Making friends.
Putting up a fence.
When I was small,
the name next door
was an Irish name.
A man who kept building
a building, never completed,
at the rear of his property.
I heard his mother
call him to supper every evening.
He was married, but still being raised.
And the large, windowless building
he was raising became still, after time.
The loads of cement
he wheeled up a plank
to pour into the mold of the walls
stopped.
I was too small to understand
the irony of it, then.
It was a pyramid in which
its priest was doing what
was ordained to be done.
To leave four great walls
for the Pharaoh’s remains.
It was one theory of several
that came to me, as I
watched the certified craziness
of McCoy acted out.
It was, that the moment
we are born,
we look for a place
to be reared,
in sync with the soul that
we are meant to be.
I moved away before the structure
was finished.
The site has been leveled.
Death laid his head down.
Later as I collected my memories
I thought of McCoy.
A sweet man, and in a mysterious
way, profound.
I laugh sometimes when
I see him inside me.