A memory that begins with I remember
has already put its memories
aside clinging to thoughts that were never real
to begin with,
the way she will say she knew you
in another life
when in reality she's not seen your kind before,
who arrive in the spring and sing so briefly
helpless to explain how it is
you can find your voice only in overgrown ditches or clumps of blackthorn,
or how, when you return home to the savannahs
in the early fall
before the deep snow comes howling in,
you will still be as unfettered
and caution-free
as the whirring cloud of swallows whose wings
she used to wish
were hers
rising like locusts over the burnt-out souls
on Hennepin who can barely recall
your wild song, and held your plain brown body in ecstacy
only once if ever
in a locked-away childhood dream
we're forced to make
trying to
believe that what we have to say
has not
been said in just this way before
and the ballsy ignorance so necessary
to plunge onward with another
fool notion sensing that no matter how
arduous the journey
somebody will have got there before us
which is why movies
have it all over poems because
there's nothing more reassuring than to go to
a new film and discover
you've seen it all before and anyway
who ever heard
of a three hankie poem
Jim Lineberger is a retired screenwriter, sometime playwright, and full-time poet.