Guessing Game

Memory is the second thing to go

I will soon be, as a friend of mine likes to say of himself, no longer in danger of dying young. Memory is a tricky enough affair even in our youth. Studies have shown that what people claim to remember may never actually have happened, or at last not as they remember the thing happening. For me, what seems to slip away most often are names, which can be particularly frustrating for someone to whom names and words matter so much.

Thanks for reading my entry today. I may not remember things as well as I used to, but I’ll always remember your kindness in allowing me to share these poems with you.

What’s this called again?

Guessing Game

Little plants that line the stone border
of the garden, why are you being so sly,
refusing to disclose to my memory
the name I’ve come to know you by?
Not that madcap tag by which I knew 
you as a kid when I mowed yards 
for pocket change. Not that.
I mean the serious, grown up 
name, scientific, even mythic,
that botanists have bestowed.
It has a lilt that becomes you,
matching the elegance with which 
you spray out slender leaves
in grassy exclamations that vibrate 
softly in a summer breeze with three,
four, maybe five or more spikes fletched 
with tiny lavender bells spurting from your roots,
from your subterranean, secret heart.
My mind aims at the name clutched there 
and cannot hit it—not by trickery, not by art.