First Swim III (Cont.)

Rembrant evocative kinesis pools into the lake-fulls of memory swallows. There is no hint of anticipatory repudiation slipping into the hippocampic repository. My axial nerves are as thick and sufficiently anesthetized in the grade B syrup, the watercolor painting of pink beach bodies and jeweled greens and blues a vibrant reinsertion to a place made closer to home than home by virtue of absence from it. The crocuses and pine-shaded daffodils ensconce a cool, unblemished reminder of possession, whereby a place remembered is thereby owned when turned over and over again in thick parchment creases of review. Plaster snakes crawl up the veranda and over the Roman arch leading to the kitchen, the closet bathroom, always cold in winter, misanthropically shunning visitors in winter, but close quarters with the grape-vine-covered window say otherwise, as if someone neglected to clip it away from view, intentionally unkempt. It is a place where forgetting is acceptable, even encouraged by grape-vine tendrils and leaves wider than the average palm, or any palm worth contemplating.

This is not my home, but every memory says it is, from the wind that slides through the porch window-casings as I read Catch-22 on the ancient brown and mahagoany flower-patterned divan, to the sounds of birds chirping vivaciously at dawn until they proclaim harbor in the New England attic treehouse, a tropical jungle as exotic and captivating as any balancing the Equator. Thick, blue-striped sailor canvas is parted to let in the sunlight that trickles through the north-facing valley, pine boughs, wide red-varnished window casings, and finally, wooden venetian blinds. Next to me, voices carry up from the drive three cool stories below, and I prepare to slip my book into the floor-to-ceiling casings on the left wall. I read over this cove of memory until worn smooth, transmutated and objectified.