Memories

I did the memory test today. It’s hard to believe
that tomorrow I may not know where I am
nor what is the day. Others have passed this way,
none to my knowledge in my family. Sorrow gnaws
the red bone of my heart. The lady at the doctor’s
counter says she is seventy. Her bed-ridden mother,
for whom she seeks medicinal solace is ninety-eight.
Her mind, she says, is as sharp as a needle or a knife,
 or a blade of grass. What dreams, I wonder, flit
through her head at night? Does she recall her child
hood with its pigtails, the first young man she kissed,
church on Sundays, the genders carefully segregated,
driving there in the family horse and cart? Thunder rolls
and shakes my world’s foundations; a storm watch,
followed by storm warnings, walks across my tv screen.
Lightning flashes. Aurora Borealis daubs the night sky
north of Island View with its paint-box palette of light.
Memories, according to the song, are they made of this.
But what is this? Is it these shape-shifting, heart-stopping
curtains of shimmering grace? Or is it those darker
shadows cast by firelight on the smoky walls
of a pre-historic Gower cave where my ancestors gnawed
the half-cooked bones of the aurox and never ever
dreamed of Jung’s racial memories as they communicate
information from the unconscious to the conscious mind.