Revisiting Gear Store

Buildings have some of the virtues
Of mountains as well as molehills.
A person with a memory

Might stand in front of some brick box
In a suburban parking lot
As in front of a childhood home,

Or a crumbling sacred temple,
Or a cow path up a foothill,
Or a bird-nested sea cliff,

And in any case see nothing
That didn't belong to the mind
Always in exactly this form.

Everything of that past person
Except lingering memory
Might have already gone away,

But the building, dull as it is,
Pulls the dream of being aware,
Alive, here, back into the light.

When buildings and memories go,
The person left waving so long
Stands awake in a dreamless sleep.