POETRY
Memory's Refrain
by Bruce Boston
Gathering in the rooms
of your abandoned childhood
without taking up space.
Unfurling like smoke
around bedposts and dressers
and the legs of your parents
towering above you.
Giving itself the time it needs
for time is its medium
and its messenger.
Flowing with a light so
treacherous in its certainty
that the edge and fill
of even fragmentary images
and fading sensations
are etched in your cells.
Turning like a dancer
as she takes on the wavering
shapes and poses of life
eidetic and lives abandoned.
Reveling in the least detail
as well as drowning
in the largest events.
Arriving most often
in solitude and overflowing
with a tumult you cannot hear.
Bruce Boston has received the Bram Stoker Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Asimov's Readers' Award, and the Grand Master Award of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. He is the author of forty books and chapbooks, including the novel Stained Glass Rain and the recent collection Flashing the Dark: Forty Short Fictions (Sam's Dot, 2006). Bruce lives in Ocala, Florida, with his wife, writer-artist Marge Simon. For more information, please visit his website (http://hometown.aol.com/bruboston).
Copyright 2006, Bruce Boston