Re Cognition

I keep waiting to see someone I recognize
someone from the distant past
now that I have returned to my childhood home,
I’ll see someone I knew very well, perhaps
even my best friend, I’ve had dozens of them
although I didn’t know them very well
at the time, I’ll see them and they’ll see
me, and instantly I won’t recognize them,
they will pass through my consciousness
like so much broken glass, everywhere
and nowhere at once, something to brush
aside, not that their features are so different,
or that I haven’t seen some recent digital
artifact imprinted beneath the nondescript
blue of manufactured interconnectedness,
rather it will be such that the shock
of recognition will jar me back from the place
I called my isolation, the future, in place
of some schoolyard tire swing jungle gym
kickball frame of reference, not to say
I’m living where you will be when you grow up,
but to dream you alive once again, my memories
so much clearer now, I reinhabit the same rooms
I used to, now with a new coat of paint
they might as well be fresh canvas on which
reflected, I still see your face, still there,
however I trace with this crayon the ghost
of a tree, raw material deteriorating slowly
in a box of the attic behind a locked door,
cradled beside the bubble gum cards
and Fisher Price neighborhoods, wobbling
until they won’t fall down, this rabbit hole
curving in on itself, hello, haven’t I
been here before? Or was that someone else. Sorry.