I am from...

I am from marigold seeds, from Volkswagen and granite jetties.

I am from the railroad tracks and the ditch, hot in the sun,
from the haze of the onion patch and the cool piney woods.

I am from the blackberry bramble, the dandelion, the round warm hen's egg.

I am from Boat Yard Saturday Night and Nonesuch Corner, from Ivan and Jeannette and Gay.

I am from the artistic temperament and the romantic tendency,
From may we please be excused now and deck us all with boston charlie.

I am from the blue book and the purple book, feeling Grace breathe life into the ranks of the pipes.

I'm from the-ship-after-the-mayflower, sweet cornbread, black-eyed peas and parfaits.
From when Rob cracked his head and I theoretically learned about tact, from croquet in the back yard, and never getting the joke behind pulling Grandfather's finger.

I am from carbon-copied onion-skin pages titled Research,
a box of black-and-white five-by-sevens,
war medals and newspaper clippings.

Slides projected on the refrigerator door taught me my own unremembered history and
decades later negatives projected in the darkroom showed what went before.

Continuing on my Fragments from Floyd roll, this is in response to a series of posts (here is one) suggesting a sort of memory exercise based on a template derived from a poem (written in the house that Jack built--oh wait, that's something else). I'm not suggesting that what I ended up with is anything approaching poetry, but it has led me down a lot of forgotten paths over the past week or so. And somewhere along the line Fred said he's trying to collect 100 WIF's by June 1, so I wanted to help out :-)