Memories and Plans - Rebecca del Rio

[Larry Robinson]


Memories and Plans

 
David, who will be eighty 

On his next birthday tells me

“It’s so odd that now I have

More memories than plans.”

 
As I walk Salzburg’s cobbled streets

Now for the fourth time

In three decades, I live

My remembrances.  

So sweet this city’s familiarity

With its centuries stacked

Against my decades of history here. 

 
On the train to Paris,

A man deluded by his youth

And drowning in testosterone

Flirts foolishly for the two young women

Seated opposite him, singing

His own praises and plans

A peacock with feathers fanned

 
He stacks his adventurous future

Against the staid and stale lives

Of the old. His imaged exciting

Rich days to come so

Significant to the quiet, boring

Days of the elderly. Still lack

Of experience lies to him, tells him

His imagined life matters more 

Than lives lived. Two men

Seated opposite him

Ask what he means when he refers 

To old. He replies “forty.” 

 
We three decades beyond old

Speed through Catalunya

And Languedoc smiling. 

 
	- Rebecca del Rio



  


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