DON RUSS

A WALK TO THE SQUARE

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

–Wm. Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

Is it the scent
or are the words there, waiting
honeysuckle-sweet inside my head?
A hot romantic red

of roses in some inner ear?
Is it memory or a memory someone else
once had, some long commemoration
of someone else’s dead?

One air to breathe, and with it
a common past? The house is antebellum.
The sidewalk’s buzzy dog-walk smell
says noon. It says today.