Memory

by Isabel Joshlin Glaser

 

Last year you carved the pumpkin
With hands as skilled
As those of any sculptor.
Remember? Remember how it sat
On the front steps, smiling
Into the dark, its warm eyes
Glowing, as if with special wisdom,
An orange intelligence?

And one week later
You carried it to the trash--
A lopsided, runny thing.
You tossed it in.

How is it then
You hear sounds in the night,
Scritch-scratches from the walls?
You know it isn't mice.

You lie in bed and listen in disbelief
As something moves somewhere.
How is it that a seed
You dropped so long ago
Sprouted beside the house,
And now the vine
Comes climbing, climbing,
Searching for its head?

 

© 2005 Isabel Joshlin Glase
originally published in Tennessee Voices

Isabel Joshlin Glaser (The Poet Laureate, Memory, Lunch Effects) is a former elementary school and high school teacher (English and Spanish). A writer of both poetry and prose for children and adults, she is the author of Dreams of Glory: Poems Starring Girls (Atheneum/Simon & Schuster) and Old Visions...New Dreams (Old Hickory Press). Her work has been published in Greensboro Review, Mississippi Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Voices in Every Direction, Tennessee Voices, Cricket, Cicada, School Magazine (NSW, Australia), Instructor, Highlights , in many anthologies, textbooks and education programs. She won Memphis Magazine Fiction Prizes in 1992 and in 1994 (for "The Poet Laureate").