Stray Moment Stray Moment
Lifting a page, a tiny flutter of paper:
 BLACKWELL'S
      OXFORD

    £ 3.00
reads the price tag,
detached and disembodied,
severed from a former life,
its and mine.

The past comes around at any moment,
paying a visit,
making memories concrete:
a bus pass, a metro map, a folded café punch card;
the other day, my colleague found
his college ID
waiting in the mail,
sent by an old paramour,
a chain of recollections spanning twenty years.

And here, a memory without context,
a bookshop from long ago,
but no book,
just a slip of paper and ink,
adhering to the past.


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