What Size Is Yours Robert Dow (bio) Keywords Robert Dow, Poetry My past is the size of my head. My head is somewhat smaller than a bowling ball. And about the size of a crystal one. My past seems much larger than my size 7 and ¼ head can handle. How do you handle it? How do you hold it up? I’m asking you, if you do not mind. The mind, perhaps, is of greater size than the brain. Or the head. Certainly it is of greater import and beyond measure. It is, the brain is, in a case, in a hold, cradled by skull. Yes, the brain is cradled and even more than this—it is set in the skeletal thin domain of our time, our short time here from beginning to end cradled by bone. We are, are we not? more fluid than bone when we’re inside our mothers? Boned, as it were, fished out, swimmingly alive and whalingly glad of it, in love with the cradling arms, milky breasts, and coo-coos of our mothers. Here goes the mind. The mind is bigger than your mother’s rose-and-thorn wallpaper-walled room. Bigger even than that. Big as a library is big with the weight of books and creaking floors of floor-to-ceiling shelved hard-bound books with call numbers, dog ears, broken spines, and the crumbling pages of one mind or another. Bigger even than a tower. Bigger maybe than two towers. The towering, the invisible towering mind is stuffed with stories and films and it sways. The mind does sway this way and that before collapsing. The mind is, I think, locked in that locked box of bone. Everything in that bone vase is ready for flowering and recall, all the echoes, the petals of memory of the memory of a sweet halved cantaloupe nearly head sized and the seed-free center filled with vanilla ice cream, ice cream that gives us an ice cream headache like an ice pick up through the corner of an eye. Like a lobotomy. There is the pick-and-shovel work of relieving raw grief, the digging in to dig out. And love, love is frozen in the mind. And those boy-and-dog stories and the lost gloves under months of mildew and growing moss growing like the aged association cortex gets lost inside thickening moss, lost in the webs and pockets of aging. I see a boy. He is bike riding through falling leaves and I see the neighbors with rakes raking leaves into piles and setting them on fire and I smell the scent of cinnamon and hallways of piss. And I feel a thigh, the high insides of a thigh and up there a small hairy cave that fills me with fear and a shuddering new sense, and fear of wind turned trees [End Page 287] and the tree shadows running up a cracked wall looking like horror shows in my mind on my way home from school. Fears I caved in to and a fear of other boys and courage enough to head-butt boys on the blank space of a schoolyard hard enough to see stars and planets flash. And a more monstrous vortex of the fear of loneliness, lost love, and the bone-rattling fear of death that shrinks the gray matter and this overruns the mind with memory, nostalgia, echolalia, melancholia. These diseases of sorrow. Oh, the overlapping noodle, softened through with regret. Or is the mind hardened through regret? How do you imagine it? In time, the past between the ears is lost like an ancient text with crumbling pages crawling with silverfish. Memory is like this; memory is a glass of milk gripped and gulped. The past is a sweet glass of milk milked of the bright white lies and the truths rising as cream out of the bottle of the brain. Is the mind bottled up? Held inside the skull like the tiny replica of a clipper ship and the bottle and ship tossed out to sea to drift on whitecapped waves and tides and vanish, as all things of your life in your head...