Idiosynchronized

People we see once: flood of faces, coats,

collars--on avenues and plazas,  in markets, 

theatres, bars, banks, hospitals.  A bent

shape hoeing weeds: one of us saw it once

one place from a train: This

is an example but only of itself.  Its

singularity can’t be transposed.  Imagine

you remember the person who interested you

terribly in that café that morning that city.

Sure it happened, but you don’t remember

because once was not enough.  People we

see once compose our lives.  Forgetting

them (we must), we lose wide arenas

of the lived.   Even ghosts return, but not

the vast mass of once-only-noticed

who compose medium and matrix

of our one time here.  We are adjacent and

circumstantial to strangers, one jostle

of flux away from knowing next to everything

about their lives.  The river of moments takes

a different channel; the one moment becomes nothing now.

The once-only appear, then appear to go 

to an Elsewhere that defines us.  They go on

to get to know who they get to know.

Their lives are theoretically real to us, like

subatomic particles.  To them their lives

are practically real to them.   From their

view, ours are not.  We know they were there,

vivid strangers, because they always are, 

every day.  Like a wreath floating 

 on the ocean, memory marks a space 

abandoned.   In large measure life is

recall of spaces occupied.  History

consists of someone who insists on being

remembered, someone who insists on 

remembering, combinations of both.  Familiarity 

and routine join to vie methodically; they

capture places in recall.  Vivid strangers are

incidentally crucial, indigenous to a

present moment that is like a mist

over a meadow, rising, evaporating 

just when we arrive, past as we are present.