Your Memory of Youth

Faint yellow, like a breed of northern morning sun,

elongated and distorted and yet beautiful, your memory

of youth consorts with you as if it’s hiding in a funhouse

mirror. Its sheerer sweeter lucency comes clearer

as you near the wide and unresisting eyes. You look

into them, find them wiser than you were prepared for.

Poreless skin is bared for you, its silken tightness beckons

like a stream of consciousness too warm and odd to enter.

It is the center of a pure circumference in which you

have no place. Except within the grace of soul,

which knows it, and which knows it whole. But you are

only mortal, and you’re old. Your memory grows cold.












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