new haven

I keep having this dream; let me tell you about it.

.

I am halfway down a city sidewalk, dusk dwindling to dark,

and the heat from the street lamps warms my back.

It's that cold-snap end of the summer

and college students are huddled together at cross-walks

or carting their things into dormitories that look like

castles.

.

It's like Hogwarts, I will say,

and my sister, who is two steps ahead, might say, I know,

the longing in her voice not belonging

solely to the subject at hand.

My brothers are off-screen, but their presence is heavy in the best way. It's been over a year since the four of us were all together like this, and there's a festivity in the air like Christmas, though it's late August.

.

The younger of my brothers went to school here, but he looks

at it now like a lost map of a once-familiar place, his eyes training on the small, margarine-yellow light

in someone’s half-open window. There's a string of fairy lights taped to the wall up there, interspersed

with hanging photos, cut-out nostalgia from a life

that's barely begun.

.

Remember when? the older of my brothers says,

cutting the silence between us once more, and we all agree

with whatever comes next, laughing.

We remember, we remember.

It's forgetting that's troubling me lately,

that probably plagues all of us:

how does one recapture the fading sound of a laugh,

the particular smell of flowery lotion on soft brown skin,

the taste of the first, the best love

melting on the tongue like a delicacy hot from the oven?

.

Between us we will not let all of her pass through the colander of our collective memory, an inverse sky shot with stars,

.

like the one above us tonight as we walk these hallowed streets, new beginnings breathing at us around every corner, the half-shuttered windows like eyes stacked on one another,

watching us move, the halo of the irrevocable surrounding us.

We have survived something, it says.

.

In only a few hours, the windows will shut

as an invisible hand turns up the sun, and we will be long gone, each back to our own lives, shining cars on their separate one-way highways, moving on, and on,

.

and on