Waking Memory
Whether the documents, separated by type,
format and function are easily accessed
depends on the amount and the quality
of the oil applied to the filing cabinet.
There are nights when the metal doesn’t glide,
nights when the rollers refuse to roll.
But when a whole drawer does come smoothly,
full folders of information fall to the floor.
Then there’s the other nights.
On these, the cabinet sits without a twitch.
Sealed at the edges, it croaks with rust
and as with a startled frog in the throat:
ribbit, out the draw hops.
It can be hard to catch
as it bounces in flashes of memory.
I watch as a football match on a VHS tape
bounds from one side of the bed to the other.
A Gameboy Colour goes flying,
and then an empty bathtub leaps over me.
Not always objects, the cabinet’s contents
can be echoic like a kind voice
telling me I could press the nurse call button
anytime I liked, and which I used
to orchestrate biscuits as an ongoing supply.
They can be iconic like the rectangles
of the hospital interior I laid in.
When they are haptic, the IV needle
sits beneath my skin again, not painful,
but its presence nagging like a nosy neighbour
who just recently moved in.
From an overlooked corner of the cabinet,
they can come charging all at once.
A split-second sensory rush too fast to figure out
in the fly-by of its moment.
A glittery trail of residue is left in its wake.
A sense of the fluids that had built up in my head.
My side-laid POV of the children’s ward.
A chemically-sweet odour flooding my nostrils.
Night by night, I close in on the scent,
closer to mixing together its true ingredients,
pouring its fragrance into a brain-shaped bottle,
naming it Hope like the memory
the amygdala has stored all these years.
R.C. Thomas lives in Plymouth, UK, with his daughter. His first collection The Strangest Thankyou (2012), and pamphlet Zygote Poems (2015), were published by Cultured Llama under the name Richard Thomas. Web: www.rcthomasthings.com
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