Go.

THE MEMORY KEEPER

The smell of pine and bacon grease,
a house in a piney tract of land, a kitchen
in the house, a stove in the kitchen,

a skillet beneath which lowly burns
a bluish flame the jets discharge when a match
is held against their sound, a sound

that travels outside in from a metered box
where a boy sits watching the radium dials
record the backward passage of time,

and time itself, the beginning of time,
and beyond the beginning a too-bright,
airless clearing where the mind lets go,

as if the past had already happened there.

Sherrod Santos