Ode to the Memory Trace

*After Neruda's elemental odes - the ordinary made sacred.*

Here, among the morning's loose machinery - this wire, this half-remembered conversation, this missile that was a thought before it surfaced and lay down among the lettuces of my attention -

I saw you, almost.

Not dead, the way a tuna is dead on the ice, but gone in the way a word is gone from the tip of the tongue - still warm, still shaped like something that lived in deeper water.

You swam in the dark behind my eyes, a fish made of almost, a torpedo of meaning that cut through the black and now lies here among the green froth of the morning's ordinary things - the coffee cup, the charging cable, the list I started and didn't finish.

I could say you were a dream. I could say you were a message from the ocean floor. But you are only a memory trace, a ripple that passed through and left no furrow.

Even so - I set the table for you. Even so - I put out a plate.

The bee goes to the rose because the rose is there. I go to the trace because it isn't. And that is a kind of love that Neruda would understand: the love of the thing that has already left the market.

Salt of the almost-said. Fire of the not-yet. You were here, among the vegetables, and I am not above them.

I am among them, reaching for the shape that swam and is gone, and the reaching is the poem, and the poem is the trace, and the trace is enough.

It is enough.

Dakota Vale, 25 July 2026