A life is a series of compartments
And
When we’re in one, it’s hard, sometimes,
To believe the others really ever existed.
With time,
It feels as though
Our own past
Happened to someone else, entirely.
In a different compartment
On a different train
On some distant planet.
When we’re children, life has
An amazing amount of unity:
Still, even then,
We have whole periods of our own young lives
We do not remember at all.
Houses we formally lived in
Rooms that saw our essence exposed
Left behind
Just another in a series of
Compartments
And
In some cases,
People get left behind in them.
At least, for me,
For all my talk of love,
There is this paradox –
I claim love as eternal,
But,
Leave people behind who I’ve loved
I wander now through
My old neighborhood
And see our old house
Where we first lived together
Where
Our children grew up
Grew angry
Grew indifferent
Grew beautiful
And which sits empty now
Once the locus of
All our myriad hopes
Just another abandoned
Building
In an out of the way city
Forgotten.
I attended a funeral yesterday.
I did not know the man who died.
His family had a hard time remembering
Much about him.
There were tears,
But there was also
A certain blankness.
As though trying to remember
A past life, or,
Perhaps,
Like trying to remember
The room you were born in
Too many compartments ago
For we are constantly reborn
And constantly
Forgetting
