Memory

I’ve been trying to find that poem
That speaks about youth and beauty.
Not the perfectly-metered one with the Greek allusions
to chipped marble vases and frozen overwrought maidens.
Not the sad one laden with regret,
Where the old woman reaches out with a tentative finger
to trace the lines of her own face in the mirror.
Not the one that avails of the words
“fleeting” or “ephemeral” or “longingly,”
because that one ruined for me
the long stretch of shadows on late autumnal afternoons.
No. It’s the one with the cerulean sky and the inward smile
and the echoes,
in which I simply
remember you.