The story of that unremembered girl
that used blue to color her sky,
was the love of my life when I was six.
To tell the story of my life
must be in poetry,
and the truth of me will be in that,
for no memory stays
where it’s supposed to stay.
I find myself in drawers,
in rooms, on the pages
of old grocery slips,
and from that
I find the mysterious,
a puzzle waiting to be reassembled
with edges.
The past is an inflated balloon,
growing bigger than a planet,
as big as a star,
a nova ready to explode.
But the girl whose name I can’t remember,
I can smell,
I can see a smile,
I can see tiny hands
as smooth as little sculptures
of ivory.
I touch now,
and wish I had touched then,
as they held a blue crayon,
to color the rafters of the world.