Poetry : Memory

Memory is an old map
I carry between my ears, edges
torn and smudged by spilled milk, coffee
stains, and teardrops.

Like footsteps, I trace my thoughts over
the snake streets, one foot after the other
leading me to mountaintops where the winds
have a name and a taste so much unlike its urban
kin who had long gone native. There are gardens
exploding with flowers, and between them are
the weeds who suck up
the nutrients of the earth and air,
burrowing themselves deep,
multiplying,
until they become a green carpet laid over
the brown bodies of the garden flowers.

Suddenly the air is filled with the perfume
of ripe mangoes. If you had plucked them weeks
ago without regard for the relationship between night
and day, warmth
and rain, you would have grimaced
as sour juices flooded your mouth,
as it once did mine.

Memory is an old map, old,
but a map,
and it leads to bright clean parkways,
to dust laced barrio roads,
to where market crops are grown,
to silent alleys where the smiles are feral
and eyes predatory, where a sudden turn to left
made you wish you had a healed scar
as a souvenir and not silent tears
as revealed by distant yellow bulbs.

I had waited…counting…
one.. two.. three…
until green lights up ahead.
I have immersed myself along the shore
though the waters could not wash away
the stains that are not on my skin,
nor in my clothes.

Memory is an old map, its roads as old
as the palm lines and street veins of my hand.
Memory is an old map, and its unfolding
sends wave after wave
breaking
on my clenched fist.

My clenched fist whose fingers part like petals,
then transforms themselves into grasping vines,
after the pen
to chart the highways and streets
of my poetry whose origins it still
has to discover and name.