to who only wants one thing

the lost picture,
having only shown once,
slipped back into the purse.
(a safe place in between traveling)
in between safe places.

today is a day we will not kick ourselves,
i see her saying. it has always been this way,
i see her saying. there, in a musty classroom
the desktop ever so bent
towards our laps. crowds of listening
and gum chewed. Giotto with the wood panels
that took a year to themselves
just to dry. the frescoes
needing each day
to be new again, or were they
to be completed in sections.
it can always be this way, she says,
& only this
in the bed of defining. it can always be this way
again.

the carpet of memory unfurls into a blue
future, the unfinished
into questions. the origin of memory is black
& white or set in the real
and the non-real

but this is convoluted, colored--
layered and abstracted by the passage of time
& new memory (distance).

mary magdalen with the foot raised to her lips,
remains as a needle
pulled through,
in the few ancient trees
we've come to remember and to lose

the picture again
like the slanted desks
to sit & stare
at gold leaf & wonder a year
at a self just for drying).