Thanks for the Memories By Philip Kobylarz

She asked if I remembered that day from a string of immemorial days, hazy, distant, misty as specifically that day was in early fall — or was it late winter? — because the leaves had fallen and were gathered, matted, in a carpeting of musk, scented with a hint of almost tobacco and old newspapers, and in the shallow crevices of hills, valleys, gullies, cricks there was a thin dust of accumulated and re-frozen snow, which highlighted, or under-lit even more so, the damp dark boughs, limbs of trees, so cold they were black and would snap in your grip when you tried to climb their Zen artistic attempt at ladders, and how the animals in the nearby zoo, what looked like a group of zebra and tapir barley moving in the chilled air, became interested, excited to see life free and randomly roving beyond a world entrapped by chain link fence, and they followed our crunching footfalls as we tried to find a trail to someplace but ended up making our own that led us either logically, or romantically, to a cemetery we had never known of, complete with forged hills crowned with embittered oak trees, crypts, abandoned graveskeeper quarters, civil war dead, tombstones, and monuments, two of which had our last names engraved and waiting.

© 2015 Philip Kobylarz

Philip Kobylarz’ recent work appears or will appear in Connecticut Review, Basalt, Santa Fe Literary Review, New American Writing, Poetry Salzburg Review, and has appeared in Best American Poetry. His book Rues was recently published by Blue Light Press of San Francisco. His collection of fiction, Now Leaving Nowheresville has been recently published and his book-length essay Nearest Istanbul is forthcoming.

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