Memories You Didn't Have

Sometimes Imagination blankets all its walls
and floors and ceilings with vicissitudes
of black-and-white B movie cues and scenes
and blondes and bad guys and the bonds
they sold in wartime: 1940s swing: Kay Kyser’s
band and brand of thing – all brassy
and reverberating through the complicated

rabbit warren of the inner ear in which you hear
ridiculously clearly all the scatter-shots
and love-me-nots vehicularly smuggled through
the German front – jeeps amid the peeps
of birdy-kins in cute cartoons – and cats
and mice and all the all-too-nameable
mild spice of Spam: the salty fatty middle

of the blandly grand perambulations through
a safe and gentle Central Park in which your
twenty-something parents shared a sandwich
in the quickly interceding autumn dark.
Sometimes Imagination parks right here:
full half-truth-years before you came upon
the century: none of which you know except

in that remaining phosphorescent glow
of mish-mashed memories you think you’re
almost able now to summon up: those stories
so revered and real to them, which now present
this alien interior experience, kaleidoscoped
into a black-and-white Kay Kyser band revue –
which somehow has a lot to do with you.


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