Under the harvest moon,
When the soft silver
Drips shimmering
Over the garden nights,
Death, the gray mocker,
Comes and whispers to you
As a beautiful friend
Who remembers.

   Under the summer roses
When the flagrant crimson
Lurks in the dusk
Of the wild red leaves,
Love, with little hands,
Comes and touches you
With a thousand memories,
And asks you
Beautiful, unanswerable questions.
~Carl Sandburg “Under the Harvest Moon”

I mistake the sound of a recycling cart
hitting the curb

for the latch of our gate
and picture him instantly:

my father stumbling
into the light of the backyard

to shoot himself.

I’d been looking at the fruit trees
and the fire pit,

the loose board of the old fence
in the wind.

I’d been thinking of how lost
you’d have to be

to believe you knew
everything there was to know

about yourself.
And now this sound

I mistake for my father
going through with it: one

awful letter in his coat pocket
to me, another

to my unborn son.
~Bobby Elliot “Mondegreen” from The Same Man

I’ve been there, and so have you.

I might hear or see or smell something
completely benign and insignificant,
but my brain processes it differently,
its similarity to past memory or experience
bringing it front and center and real again.

Often it is a song, or a smell, or a date on the calendar.
It can be an unexpected, sudden sound,
like a slammed door
or a recorded voice or photo from long ago.

This can lead to time travel
back to that previous moment in time,
with the feeling of being right there again.

It can be a lovely memory, warm and comforting,
or it can be a total nightmare
I never want to remember or reexperience.

When it happens to me,
to distract from the distress it can cause,
I instead admire the stickiness of my stored memories,
how powerful chemical connections are
between my body and my feelings.

There is poignancy in how I
relive those moments of past joy and struggles,
trying to capture in words what just happened,
all the while knowing, for the rest of my days,
some questions will forever remain unanswered.