Memory Green

Simon Garden

Memory Green 

Yes and when the warm unseasonable weather

Comes at the year’s end of the next late year

And the southwest wind that smells of rain and summer

Strips the huge branches of their dying leaves,

And you at dusk along the Friedrichstrasse

Or you in Paris on the windy quay

Shuffle the shallow fallen leaves before you

Thinking the thoughts that like the grey clouds change,

You will not understand why suddenly sweetness

Fills in your heart nor the tears come to your eyes:

You will stand in the June-warm wind and the leaves falling:

When was it so before, you will say, With whom?

You will not remember this at all: you will stand there

Feeling the wind on your throat, the wind in your sleeves,

You will smell the dead leaves in the grass of a garden:

You will close your eyes: With whom, you will say,

Ah where?

Archibald MacLeish

"You will not understand why..."

"You will not remember this at all."

 

 

I don't even know how to talk about this poem. It's about sensations and as-if's, about inexplicable emotions, states of mind and memory for which there are no words.

 

 I see that this is the poet's territory. The poet's work. Travel to the unmapped parts of the human experience and examine what is there. Not what is imagined, hoped for, dreamed - only what is true.

 

 

 "I Carried With Me Poems", by Gail Dusenbery  talks about becoming "the poet's accomplice".

I want to be that too. I want to go to the places there are no words for, and learn with the poets what is true.