Head full of sermons, mouth full of spiders.

This poem reminded me of my childhood, and how I'm a sucker for old times. Enjoy.

house league photo
By Matt Robinson

recollection is not a faded black-and-white
snapshot, no bruised paper’s sepia-stained insistence — i’m not

old enough for that. coloured, hued and hewn, it is instead
a commotion of smells and sounds, and a strained ciphering of

the shapes, their chill crystal geometry, through something akin to
morning-breath fog on hockey rink glass.

in fact, the lapses,
the inaccuracies, are in themselves a reminiscence: a frustration

not unlike the anxious zamboni moments between that last lace or
chin-strap and the first cut of ice.

and so this process
of memory, of revisiting ourselves, becomes that musty rubber

shuffle down a blade-scarred mat from locker-room to cool,
hard motion.

so even these pictures, their cardboard frames now
just as ragtag as our mismatched, ripped knee socks, are not

as concrete for me (though actually here in hand) as the salt-sweat,
leather-rot staleness of the gear, the waft-curling smell of

rothman’s smoke on my father’s breath, or the dull thuds: of pucks
on the dead dashers of boards, of early saturday morning trunks.