Looking up I see empty

                                                            windows. Feels like home.

                                             I bump-slide down

                               painted steps

                 to sidewalk.

 

Is this a dream assembled from words I heard

before we moved to the suburbs?

I see pictures of the new house on Southgate,

blank face      no lawn      no color

hollow-winter-window eyes,

not memory.

 

How can my mind see so clear a vision

of 68th Street, South Central LA

when I was only three years old

but not remember the newer house

without photos to prompt me?

Which is memory,

which artifact      after-fact      art of fact?

Yet it all reconstructs so true-to-mind:

 

images, not hand-held like Polaroids,

remembered smudges on paper borders,

but lived vignettes edged with echoed feelings

of times      places      people      events

trick my brain into believing

                 they are real.

 

                 Over-bundled, pink-faced toddler that I was,

                             somehow, I feel the tree-buckled

                                         sidewalk underfoot,

                                                     hear cars along the parkway,

                                                                 smell the grass, and looking up

                                                                             I see blind-lines without a face

                                                                                         to see me through.

                                                                             I turn and run

                                                                 to find my neighbor-friend,

                                                     a laughing black-faced boy

                                         red jacketed, white capped,

                             bump-slide down his painted steps

                 to meet me.

No photo have I seen

to match this scene.