Remembered Forgetting

for Briggs

How many ghosts live mostly lost in lives
Like ours? Some long and lasting, others brief,
These friendships, journeys that do not arrive.

Ways can divide by pride and bitter grief;
Ambition, chance, desire; joy and neglect;
And someone who was-is someone is not,
Well, not to me.
……………………………….So I did not expect
To see him dead, for twenty years forgot,
And sixteen of them when he truly “was”–
Plane wrecked in windstorm, almost twenty-five.

Discovering his death, with a flash in my pause,
I remembered forgetting how I arrived
Cold at his house from that hill with our sleds,
Concussed by high-flying, heals over head.

You can listen to me read it here https://soundcloud.com/benwhitepoetry/remembered-forgetting-1