The Familiar Alien

We gawp in childlike wonder,
At the adults we've become,
Trying to rescue form the fire,
The memory that will tell us what we knew,
And rake from its ashes,
What remains and belongs to the now,

The bones we knew,
Submerged,
Beneath the flesh,
The bones we can now see have emerged,
From flesh that has now retracted,
The same but not the same,
The familiar alien,
The alien familiar,

I was thin then,
And you were not,
I am not now,
And you are more so,
Like we swapped torso,

Like I swapped friendship for curiosity,

And we recede once more from view
Like carp,
Into memory's murkier waters.




M Joseph Burt, 2006
(For Kim)