PAST SENSES

The past just when it seems most lost                                        
exudes a kind of sweet scent,                                            
Put the photographs up against your nose,
especially the sepia ones.
Those are years you're breathing in.
Childhood, that lilac time.
Nostalgia, innocence, halcyon days.
This album is the real perfume counter.

Remembering is a kind of ambrosia too.                  
You can't relive those days
but you can savor them on the tongue.
Enough days and nights
longing for what cannot be again,
and you can make a meal of it.
Taste the honey, the bread, the chive,
crumb and name competing on the lips.

Put the people up against your ear.
They speak well of your memory.
Even the scenery can splash and flap
and skitter and sight a little.
And touch them too.
Feel the slick paper,
the curled edges of their love.

Eyes by this are even unnecessary.
Besides, they're consummate spoilsports,
evidence mongers from way back.
Eyes want the places as they are today,
the people living, breathing or they're nothing.
But just wait, you get older, vision fades.
And there's true vision waiting to replace it.