You don’t remember me, my little wooden stalker

accuses, poised atop his cheese-wheel base. His

eyeless face fixes on me with an uncomprehending

stare, but his condemnation begs me to remember.

Five years gone, and I haven’t touched him, not

even to shake off the grey gossamer cobwebs

slung over his reedy arms and legs. Forgotten by time

and a careless artist who has moved to a different medium.

Yet he keeps his last hopeful pose, orbed joints shaping his

gangly boxwood build, arms  and legs in swinging arcs,

some semblance of a sprinter’s stance that resides only

in a lapsed painter’s mind, but never on canvas.

I can’t remember, and I haven’t the heart to admit it, even to a

voiceless figurine. So I pluck him up from the desktop, grimacing

at the grainy grime under writer-smooth finger-pads and

with a creasing brow, mold him, shape him, once again.

His wood’s still soft, more balsa than boxwood, but when I bend a

limb, his arm-spring chirrups in shrill disapproval—a twist too far. But he

holds. Satisfied, I turn his dust-swaddled head toward mine, but he still

accuses, face blank and reproving, you don’t remember me.