museums filled with skillfully stuffed memories

you know those dreams...the ones where someone you have not thought of for....months or years....someone who was once there, daily, but time and life has made this person only a stranger on the street you duck from...barely a memory now. barely. and then you have a dream and the person is across the table and smiling and it feels wonderful to know them again. to feel their eyes in conversation....to look at them and not duck behind a parked car and cut into the alley. and you wake up and feel something similar to sadness but not quite. similar to missing, but not really. because in real life you would like them to stay a stranger. you like that they are barely a memory. barely. but....you liked the dream and how it felt to know them again...like that...in your mind.

i had one of those dreams. and then i was reading my new book of e.e. cummings poems and found this:




it is so long since my heart has been with yours

shut by our mingling arms through
a darkness where new lights begin and
increase,
since your mind has walked into
my kiss as a stranger
into the streets and colours of a town-

that i have perhaps forgotten
how, always(from
these hurrying crudities
of blood and flesh)Love
coins His most gradual gesture,

and whittles life to eternity

-after which our separating selves become museums
filled with skillfully stuffed memories


e.e. cummings