Poem: Memories

I'm still working on this poem, it's fairly new.

Memories

Home: a stranger that welcomes me back
with a kettle on the stove,
a plate of peanut butter cookies, the tops
crisscrossed by the tines of a fork.
Growing up, the tea was bitter, scalding,
but now the memory soothes my throat.
I broke my arm, I’m told, and I find evidence
in photographs, orange time-stamps: ’88, ’89,
but no matter how hard I try, I cannot recall
which arm or whether I wore a bag while showering.
It’s the same if you asked me the Bill of Rights
or whether my childhood dog was short furred
and long tongued or the other way around.

What does it mean for these things to be lost
to the convalescence of a burdened mind?
Drinking a brew of Old English,
looking out this new city now,
its violent hills racing down to the bay.
I imagine a marathon of memories gamboling
down those side streets, through the park, waving banners.
Take me, keep me, they cry – a first kiss
at Rodin’s Gates of Hell, the presidents of the United States,
Yeats’ poem (what was it?) about Helen of Troy.
Her face never drew my pen across the page,
but it seized Yeats with purpose.
Such strangers vying for attention,
knowing I cannot take them all back,
afraid of being resigned to the place I’ve already tossed
this week’s grocery list, the lecture on Beck’s triad.
Outside my window, I see an x-ray from class today stop
to pick up a young boy in rollerblades
who has just fallen and fractured his arm.