Re/collection

“…experiments convinced [Frederic] Bartlett to think in terms not of a static thing called ‘memory,’ but rather a dynamic process of ‘remembering’.  He wrote: ‘Remembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable fixed, lifeless and fragmentary traces. It is an imaginative reconstruction, or construction, built out of the relation of our attitude towards a whole active mass of organized past reactions or experience… It is thus hardly ever intact.’”

- Oliver Sacks – Hallucinations

The confounded wolf cocked a ragged ear
and attended as the unsucculent saint, palm
upraised, adjured him for the love of God
to lay off the bloody predation,
and bargained the villagers to lay out
regular tidbits to satisfy him
happily ever after. 

The specificity of grey cobblestones and grey
weather, ancient oak doors massive and closed
against unseasonable travelers in this town
where Francisco tamed the wolf, have fractured
into images of themselves and lodged
in my cranial crevices like eels in a reef,
to be coaxed out by the twitching of my pen nib.

Reassembled, these are what I call memories, tempered
by what I learned and felt and turned attention to
that day, apart from what you perceived.
It was the same day and place, was it not, but
our recollections reside individual as sandgrains
in a single beach divided by a headland:

• the desolate canal on Via del Camignano 

• the cable car to the Basilica di Sant'Ubaldo inactive for the winter

• Piazza Giordano Bruno blocked by a funeral procession.

The particulars pass into legend
with retelling, the embellishment
of inexactitudes, truth not
getting in the way of a good story.
The purple bicycle leant against a stone wall,
spangled by raindrops run together  

down the frame to drip, puddle and reflect
the static wheels and seat vacant
below the wind-whipped clouds of Gubbio.
Do you remember?It was Lucca.