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Eric Ashford | + Follow Poet |
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Memory Lanes

After the trauma of separation 
after the slick delivery, the breaking apart
of fluids that fed and breathed for you
while you were still a suckling life-raft 
in your mothers emptying ocean.

While you were that blank slate, loving nothing 
but the need to be nursed within a being 
you could hardly comprehend,
memory arose as if it were a worn-down penny
in a strangers pocket.

Not until later did memory recall itself,
a snake coiling around the vine of your spine,
even then only a mere pastiche of pictures
drawn by a blind and incomprehensible artist.
until you understood that that blind artist was yourself.

Later still, memories piled up like crashed cars,
the race was so speedy and your recording of it so slow.
The grooves in your mind turning too shallowly 
only engraved enough to record no more 
than a few starkly etched moments.

Not until you plunged into an age older 
than your growing body did you begin to ask yourself 
what was before all this world of your memory?

You see vaguely, an end and a beginning.
It seems that you were pushed outward
or inward only to displace an infinite length of string
to find this short rope of a life
that becomes shorter as it measures itself.

What puzzles you is
that you feel that there was an agreement
to die to yourself before you were birthed.
You come to believe this
because you understand that nothing comes 
from nothing.
For now though you are this self-made being
with a past only as long as your first breath.

You want to know what came before.
You hope to recall that former self
behind its obscuring veil, 
beyond that cryptic tabula rasa 
of your continuing self.

Copyright © Eric Ashford | Year Posted 2021

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