New places must be colonized
for the sake of memory.
For almost a year now
I have been remembering
something or other in the
ball of my left foot,
a dull aching memory,
like calcium, like an old
wound I can't forget,
like an old lover I meet
on the street when it rains.
And it's such a risk to travel
all the way down there,
through all of the danger
inside of myself,
to get to the bottom of it,
as it were, to go to the
actual site of memory
and admit that
that is indeed
my purpose.
I keep going to
my fingers instead
and then raising
my foot to them
as if it were an eggplant
or a stuffed animal
or the Sunday New York Times.
In this dull hazy
lumbering externalism
the seat of memory is preserved -
nothing ever gets done.
