old flatbed truck
Shawnee, Oklahoma
© C.C. Brooks

In Baja del Sur time moves faster than the dust on a cantina floor blown by the salty wind, but the past stays with us just like a scar.  Or a regret . . . How long can a man carry the weight of the choices he didn’t make?

                 -from the poem “Lo Siento” (I’m sorry) by Sly Alley

MEMORY

I wish I could remember the face of that fleeting woman,

surely ten years my senior,
if it is possible to fall in love in a single embrace
dancing to “You’re So Vain”
in a sailor bar in Memphis.

I’d like to forget the time we tried to hike across the Mexicali border

to the Sea of Cortez,
with nothing but a backpack full of beer
and a pocket full of dreams. 
But we were turned back
by a hive of pickpockets and youthful lust,
getting not past the first whorehouse cantina. 

I pretend to remember James Cannon Brooks,

my great-great-grandfather. 
He was captured at Cassville
during Sherman’s March to the Sea
and then shot by a guard at Rock Island
where he was an easy target
at a fetid privy near the perimeter fence kill line,
a world away from his sweet Mississippi home.

I remember an imperfect night in a Tokyo bar

crowded with Marines
and beautiful women
except for their bad teeth. 
My best friend screwing one of them in the only bathroom,
causing a long line of desperation. 
We missed the last train to Yokosuka
and slept on the train station sidewalk. 
Where I woke to the buzz of a Tokyo morning,
into the irritated eyes of an old woman
silhouetting my body
with stack of magazines. 

I wish I could remember more about my grandfather

whom from whiskey and work
lived hard and died harder. 
But all I remember are his cotton pickin’ euphemisms
to John Brown and Sam Hill. 
And his smoky, subterranean voice,
singing the working songs of Woody Guthrie,
the train songs of Jimmie Rodgers.

Millions are wasted predicting a future

impossible to predict. 
Everything we are is the past of memory
and the tenuous present,
except for dreams,
which if we’re lucky
will lay claim on the future.