Each morning in the gray margin
between sleep and rising, I find myself
on Pershing Avenue, St. Louis, examining bricks
in buildings, looking for the one I brushed
with my mitten in 1956. How will I know it
when I find it? A shade goes up in one window.
This is where the man in the undershirt lived.
Someone shakes a coffee can and turns on a faucet;
water gushes out, ice-cold.
Why do I want this brick? What does a brick,
red or otherwise, have to tell anyone
about how to live a life? It’s as crazy
as crying for a bear when you were three,
those little hands hopefully touching the nose,
maybe they even named it. “Fuzzy.”
So what could I name a brick? Hard.
What Buildings Are Made Of. 
And why would one brick that I brushed
while on a walk with my mother and father
become a shrine? Later we rode a bus.
My father carried a sack from a drugstore.
I stared hard at the faces of shops
to see what they looked like in the dark.
And things went on that way for decades,
doors opening, buzzers going off,
someone saying, “We’re almost there.”

So. This has something to do with why
I stare at certain buildings in any city.
I don’t know where the mittens went,
they had a cord to keep them together.
I’m sure my parents could drive down
Pershing Avenue tomorrow without weeping.
But its different for me.
It’s the snagged edge, the center of memory,
the place where I get off and on.