Early Memories
P Patti Masterman
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There are places we hold in memory
where there is no record of having really gone.
Maybe they were only the colicky dream of an infant,
or a precognition of something that could exist, must have
existed somewhere, at some time. Perhaps we have longed for it,
without knowing the way there, except by remembering it in a dream.
Become a little child now, like you once were,
go back again to that place that fascinates you:
back to the wide stream, covered with lilies,
the slowly flowing water and the island, with the banks of lilies
suspended, floating upon the water.
Alone at this age, as it happens (which almost never happens)
you can feel the pull, the attraction.
The ripples spreading slowly, uniformly..
There is a machine-like quality that is different here,
like a pattern you are only beginning to learn to recognize.
Only this image exists, in quietude; there is no upstream, no downstream...
But do you dare go into the water itself?
There is already present the desire to fully immerse what later
will become the self, into all that clear, cold-flowing lucidness.
You can't really know what lies beneath.
It looks so light-filled, but perhaps- perhaps
there is some hidden darkness there,
behind all that beseeches you?
Try to remember that question you felt stirring
while viewing that picture (though much more than a picture)
What is beneath the water? What could there be,
what do the lilies conceal under their stately flowers?
There must be something more than meets the eye.
Are you simply a child in a fairy-tale waiting to happen?
Or lost in a metaphor of life unfolding?
You want to go deeper into that scene, that image,
look down under the water, see what draws the attention so.
If you could not go into it, then at least be able to see
if there were more;
not wanting to miss whatever it is, just under
the loveliness. Push the lilies aside, bend your head low
over the water, now look deeply... But something stops you,
stops even the thought of it, as though it were not
allowed. As though even the thinking of it were verboten.
You are merely observer here, an omniscient character,
hovering, floating, present unaccountably without
anything solid supporting you. Like a dreamer transported
bodily into a reverie, but it was really only mind. Only
the consciously thinking part.
Realize you were never meant to see past the surface of it,
like a magic trick, like a mirror, a reflection.
Even as children, the greater forces that pull
the adult are already at work, the tendencies
yet unseen, the characteristics that will define the person.
Maybe it was so pristine, you shunned the idea
of investigating further.
Or maybe it was your safe place, a retreat from things
just as mysterious, and even less well understood.
And maybe you didn't want to diminish its impact ever,
by investigating it's limits, it's finality.
You needed it to stay just as it was, forever.
A place always there for you, available and unchanging.
One place that need never change, lest it become merely common,
trampled by time.
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