Autonostalgia by Ray Succre

At perch in buckets by the hour,
and on filmy cola rims,
I snapped a shutter, daylight caught
atop the water in a boat,

and there between my eye and next,
and there in the nightcrawler-mulch
on my sleeves, and farthest into this
wind-stripped memory, nothing
so large as my father’s presence.

Nostalgia has its life in hundreds
of flashes, so strangely reduced
as to admire pebbles,
and though in warm memory
my father dictates, I, myself,
in them barely seem to infer a soul.

Most of the memorable me
will only be found in other heads.


Ray Succre, Oregon, USA