Memory Stick by David Chorlton

Surprises fall from the sky. Today it’s rain,

another time

a sequined purse came down

and sparkled with cheap gold on the sidewalk.

Right now a dark hawk

passes smoothly overhead, an invisible hand

makes ripples in standing water

and a moth that darkness left behind

is clinging to the window screen.

A book describing

seven Chakras fluttered down

beside the road and lay there for weeks,

a piece of corrugated cardboard inked

to plead for help

rests on the ground close to

a freeway ramp, and Heaven help us

someone lost their

toothpaste and a bracelet

on a quiet suburban street. The wind

can’t tell a summons from

a shopping list when

it blows them across an intersection

already littered with the glass

from a headlight and a buckled length of chrome

from when two cars collided on their way

between the stars. And almost imperceptible

is the tiny flash drive

that landed in a parking lot, which,

when plugged into a personal computer,

reveals the history it has carried

through the universe

of how everything began, but refuses

to disclose from which

of many gods it came.

David Chorlton is a transplanted European, who has lived in Phoenix since 1978. His poems often reflect his affection for the natural world, as well as occasional bewilderment at aspects of human behavior. A recent collection of poems is Bird on a Wire from Presa Press, and The Bitter Oleander Press published Shatter the Bell in my Ear, his translations of poems by Austrian poet Christine Lavant. A new book, Reading T. S. Eliot to a Bird, is out from Hoot ‘n Waddle, based in Phoenix.