And Then One Day We Left

And then one day we left. We packed our things
in U-Hauls and receded like the tide.
We thought we knew the place, but what we knew
was sand in porous bags that sifted out in trails
before the first McDonald’s. The rules of games,
the neighbors’ secret nights, and who said what
to start the great Thanksgiving fight—all told
divergent ways, and vanished in the telling.

And so our memories dissolved. But sometimes,
the color of the light, a shout, a chance
aroma gave us just a fleeting glimpse,
a vision, falling down in place within
our minds, with nothing now to tell us but
the only way to remember’s to forget.