Like the lone albatross
Circling the unconscious sea
I float over the memories
Surveying the childhood
I once inhabited

From every perspective
I've studied my grandmother's kitchen
But it is the view from above
The seabird’s scrutiny
That my mind's eye always favors

The narrow back staircase
Peeling wallpaper, threadbare carpet
Age and decay
Yet fragrant with ancient spices
Mysterious witch hazel

The old radiators, clanking and hissing
With the same city steam
Billowing up through grates
In the cobblestone alleyway
Dividing the block

Opening the door, I freeze
Gramma, her head in the oven
Is lighting the pilot
At last I hear the ignition, and breath
We are always the first two awake

The odor of gas recedes
Coffee begins percolating
Eggs and bacon sizzling
Gramma wrapping celery stalks
For my grandfather’s lunch

Through the main hallway
My parents arrive at breakfast
Early symptoms of marital strife
The nuances of voice and manner
As clear to me then as now

But insight awaited maturity
Gramma, so often the safe vessel
As I let the images float freely in memory
Occasionally washing ashore
With new fragments of understanding

The poet’s task, the search for lost time
The reckoning, the haunting
The daunting translation
Of personal into universal
The insoluble mystery we all must inhabit

Sometimes, retrieving a pan
From below my gas stove
I would catch a brief whiff of gas
And feel the instant evocation
Of my grandmother's kitchen

Nostalgic reverie
Deepens and sweetens with age
Ecostalgia, a ramifying darkness
Of shame and grief
Where will it end, how much will we lose?

In action there can be hope
A gas furnace and water heater
Now replaced by a heat pump
Powered by a few solar panels
Yet feelings of futility linger

My four burner gas stove
Now a single induction cooktop
Quick and efficient, I’ve warmed to it
But I miss the olfactory seance
The spontaneous visitation of the past

Accelerating extinctions
Melting glaciers, rising oceans
Our brackish new vocabulary
How to translate a collective crisis
Into singular personal action?

Psyche’s vast ocean
Undertows of shadows,
Tricksters, fools, and self-deception
Gyres of slack indifference
As wild life is extinguished

The wind shifts, I glide away
From childhood’s lost innocence
Refractory reflections
On the collective paradise
We are destroying

Outside a Flicker cries its single note
Plaintive, beseeching, as if mirroring
The ponderous wanderings of my soul
Serendipity, synchronicity
I smile, grateful for the mystery