On Returning to an Old Neighborhood

by Larry Kilman

The trees shade the street this time of year, dappling the pavement,

and the façades are like cut glass deep in the afternoon.

This is how I will remember it, drinking it deep,

a last walk in a neighborhood of thirty years.

I made a promise to return, but work and other occupations intervened.

Trajectories change with new discoveries and favorite places

between work and home, work and home. The past takes a back seat.

Then one day I return on a random errand and think,

what has it been? Two years? This is where my life took place

and now it seems chimerical, not exactly forgotten but otherworldly.

I dive into a renowned restaurant for lunch,

order tiny fried fish and blood sausage with the house red,

momentarily nestled in nothing but pleasure, to be extended

with an afternoon in an old saloon, comfortable as a glove,

remembering when I bounced quarters off the bar and won three bucks,

the scars in the wood still there, right in front of me.

On the side of our old building stands a tarnished staircase,

a shortcut to the parking lot three flights below.

So many passages, a little thing that defined the daily,

eroded from memory until the eye reminds and renews.

In the end, the measure of what has passed and what remains

is not the new year or the start of school,

the phases of the moon or the unremembered days.

It is another view of a rusty staircase in the rain.