Our Family In Spring Poem by Daniel Brick

for my twin sister, Mary

In English when we miss someone
we say, You were on my mind,
as if this person stood upon a platform
called MIND and witnessed our thoughts
in the very instant of their origin
straight through their existence,
until new thoughts, equally yours,
crowd them out. Such is the fate
of the metaphors we invent and use.

Other times it may be a deceased
loved one who occupies our minds.
And so a sister and a brother,
even in different cities,
will feel the almost living
presence of their mother.
Perhaps both hear an echo
of her chiding wisdom, or they
recall in their separate
realities a flash of humor
that made everyone at the table
laugh. Or a long ago vacation
at a summer resort returns
in bits and pieces, until you see
a stand of aspens behind the family,
and Mom is not hiding from the camera
for once, and trees and people are whole.
Memory evokes her presence, and it is
a presence that still lives inside us.
Isn't it remarkable
such miracles still occur?

Still I wonder, how can our small
memories, even when we combine all of
our separate strands into a mental treasury,
overcome Time's fleet progress forward.
We stop and look backward into the past,
when both Mom and Dad were with us,
and reality was one and whole. I mean,
our family was one and whole, and joy
was manifold. Even as I say that remembrance
Time has taken its huge steps away from human
lives. And we must once again use
memory when reality is Time's hostage, or
dwell bereft in loss upon loss.

But recall that platform of MIND. It is
a kind of playfulness with reality
scaled down to the dimensions of childhood
delights. And you can laugh and cry
or both, because real things - trees,
photographs of picnics, house keys, knitting,
old clothes, grandma's black-bead rosary,
Dad's fedora he never wore, Mom's house-dresses
she always wore - all these things become infinitely
malleable in memory and each has its niche
where your mind welcomes it. And then the heaviness
of events lightens, even dissolves in remembrance.
Isn't it remarkable such miracles occur?