A Memory of the Old World

Poem

Photo by Tyler Jamieson Moulton on Unsplash

A Memory of the Old World

Midway through the journey of my life,
I’ve returned to a memory of years prior,
when I ate a succulent ossobuco at the Old World,
in celebration of the day I was born.
The meat falling from the bone.
My father sat across from me
urging me to enjoy life.

It must have been my 30th. 
It couldn’t have been my 40th.
A year of lockdowns and catastrophe,
a year that accordioned into the next.
Vanishing the same way the exactness
of this memory has disappeared.
Everything slips away from us.
Even the Old World no longer exists
and my father is gone now too.

Midway through the journey of my life
I ate at a European restaurant
In a rural floral Floridian city.
A place my father loved,
though he’d never been to Europe.

How much of life
is the process
of one thing being  
replaced by another?
The fineness of a memory
disintegrating through time’s sieve.

We don’t recognize
how everything we love
is impossible to hold onto.
How the mourning doves,
a constant soundtrack 
of our childhood,
no longer call out to us.