Busy little monkey mind at work
while I watch the dance of willow leaves
outside our window and remember
other bedrooms, the way I “recall”
past lives’ vague but plausible camouflage.
One year, beneath a crackle-printed comforter
I fret about the future; another day,
fanned out on a terry-cloth chaise, I pine
for the past, for the bristle-haired troll dolls
I kept in a shoebox when I was ten
and the lined index cards on which I wrote
unconnected nouns over and over,
each a skeleton key keyed only to itself,
unselfconscious as a series of selfies.
Poem of the Week
Shoe Box
Carol Moldaw
Carol Moldaw is the author of Beauty Refracted. New work is forthcoming in The Harvard Review and has been in The New York Review of Books, FIELD, Plume and On the Seawall, which also published an interview with Moldaw last spring.