Word Count:168

 “Then there lives within us not a memory of history but a memory of the cosmos. Times when nothing happened come back.” (Bachelard, 119)

“The pure memory has no date. It has a season.” (Bachelard, 116)

 “a whole vanished universe is preserved by an odor.” (Bachelard)

 *The poems correspond in order of the three quotes.

1)

the eruptions

of reverie,

the micro-pulsations,

cause our skin

to dream

of a time

when nothing

happened.

2)

I slip between a time of now and when

the days light lasted long into the night,

and the sun broke apart and scattered

across the sky and everything was possible

and nothing was done in the thick heat

of my body sticky with pollen and petals,

and the tangy earth-like sweetness of my

humid skin stretched over lazy summer

bones.

 3)

This house is old. I smell its old age in the cobwebbed history of its bones (old books, sun bleached photos, antique furniture, dusty wood, empty dresser drawers, lavender, loose wall paper). It holds a heat that warms the deepest part of me, a part of that pulsing piece thats hidden between my spine and rib cage. The cotton bub breeze carries traces of river and moves through lace curtains and through my mind, kicking up forgotten feelings, suspending me in this moment of pure memory.