Aliases

I copied my wife Cathy’s many files
To a folder, so I thought; but they were ghosts,
Empty shells without a soul whose wiles
Were salmon I once had caught,
Now escaping from the net.
And now I ask the powers of the night
To spline these memories of our lives
Together with my reeled-in line,
From shoals and fragments of a breeze,
Nostalgically marine,
That riffles through the trawling sky
Which has stolen sea and sand
From our empty screen, and I cry,
Return, right now, the pages that the wind
Of RAM and ROM has always overseen…

But apparently this reasonable wish
Is minimized by the churning sea,
My tiny sounds pasted in between
The typhoons of the past, as light
As foam, as deep as graves,
And as easily erased by waves,
Exposed like Kodachrome,
In the trenches where strange fish
Interweave so far from home.

So I admit the past is irretrievable.
But can I just, by checking
In the box, all the future of my files admit
To the painful archive of this wrecking
Loss? Surrounded with the spirits
Of loved children, their faces end
To end like rivers of the dead
In this empty age, can we ignore
The rustling of palms and lap of waves,
And their words, with our torn memories, restore?

April 10th, 2020
Kailua