By John Davis
It was several years before I told you how close I came to death.
It had been months.
I was trying to sew memories
of home into my back pocket.
I looked for moments to
rip them out and make them move like something alive.
After the explosion, I remember
lying disoriented in an overgrown field of poppies
feeling rushed into my own loneliness.
There is still a strangeness to that field.
The hectares of lush lavender and fuschia
flowing and breaking, then coming together.
It might as well have been the ebbing of shore-bound
breakers at the Cape, or Newport, or some dreamscape.
Then suddenly, I remembered all
the events I forgot to live:
the time I learned the guitar…
the day I painted a self-portrait…
the moment I loved a beautiful woman…
I remember lying on my back
watching the sky open up just before dusk.
The clouds overhead.
Then the sunlight that passed through them.
Hawaii Pacific Review 