STORIES
My own memory is without me
I do not feature in it
Just a lot of regurgitated stories
That may have a crumb of truth
When passed on they survive
But ever fainter, in another’s failing memory
But collect them: not for hoarding but dispersal
If they’re not told now
They never will be
RETURN PLUS ONE
From the city to the country
I’ll drive you through grey secrets to the sunlight.
But it won’t start quite so easy
With staccato conversation
As the keyboards and the numbers
Hurtle all in chaos
Disappearing into recent history
And fading into kaleidoscopic tarmac.
With each mile the knots untighten
As the just-gone past slips further
The long-nursed and practised words
Get closer to each other.
We’ll go to and through the country
And I’ll ask you to join the searching
For pre-historic pictures
Of my half-invented childhood –
With its creased and faded memories
Of a pined and acred mansion,
And truants on wet autumn leaves,
And the chase across the railways,
And an orchard, snakes and giant gardeners.
To find nothing would not matter
If you listened to my well-digested stories.
As in dreams there is no journey
When you move from one scene to another,
So we now are near the river,
Past the pleasant ordered platitudes
Known as suburbia and you’ll wonder
But have doubts that cool before the melting
And then freeze before the kissing
Sends them shattering forever.
On through once virile dockland
That had green-black crumbling jetties;
Where merchants’ quayside houses and Victorian alleys
Mingled with decaying atmospheric slums,
But now are uniformly turned from warehouse
To the boring blocks of docklands without docks.
Ignoring these and lightly on to where
The banks are opened to the white-columned symmetry
Of classic grandeur backed by the first green hill downstream.
Adult and pre-childhood memories interlock:
Pepys, Nelson, clippers, stars and kingly kingly meetings.
All worthy background to another story
If you let me take you,
by the river.
Remembered?
Is memory just another recitation of a tale?
and your childhood stories, wrong and rose-tinted,
the replay of last year’s recounting?
Nothing original, nothing from long distance;
the deepened highlights and the heightened depths,
told on from year to year:
flash recitals of the last repeat.
Think once and it’s an early videoed image.
Think twice and there’s a photo on a screen within a screen.
Once more and a hundred reflections are mirrored in a never-ending hall,
but walking past, not one the same.
Deceived, you close your eyes.
Be frugal with your memories,
you may use them up.
shrinking and fading each time
you reminisce.
Suppose you change each time you tell them
but the memories stay the same like Dorian Gray?
Then the worlds of image and reality cannot be told apart,
and everything we know is deleted
from the start.