When I was growing up in Fullerton, there was an abandoned building on the edge of downtown that always confounded me when I rode by. It was in an awkward location for drivers -- at the bottom of a brief dip in the road, which meant that you might accelerate right past unless you were looking for it in advance -- and it had the dusty, faded look of a place whose heyday resided in a few people's memories. Evidently, it had been a small grocery store, as evidenced by the barely visible Carnation Ice Cream sign painted in the bottom right corner. That Carnation sign was what mesmerized me. How many people had once gone through the front door, seeking a treat on a hot day? Did any children taste their first bite of vanilla in the shade outside? Looking at that parched logo, I reduced the building's history to two simple phases: Once, joy had taken place there, and now the joy was gone. The remnants of that corporate image on the wall served as an memorial.

I find buildings fascinating. They are all empty canvases, waiting for emotions to load them with color. Years ago, when I pushed my daughter around the neighborhood in a stroller, I kept a running commentary about the houses that we passed. Almost all of them were silent and closed from the outside; as I've noted in another blog entry, neighborhoods tend to be private places. Here, we approached a two-story house with a car in the driveway. How giddy did the owner of that car feel when he or she first saw the house for sale? Who lived in that upstairs bedroom, and what was the most exhilarating moment that had ever taken place in it? Perhaps its occupant had opened a college acceptance letter, kissed a loved one for the first time, recovered from a debilitating illness. Now, here was a one-story house with a gravel yard and an American flag draped over the porch. The owner who displayed it must have felt patriotic. On 9/11, did the bedroom inside the house reverberate with sobs? Someone else would move into the house one day, and that person have no idea what had been said or felt inside of it. The house would be a canvas again, ready to be filled.

We spend our lives passing by the traces of lives. Every house, every business, every street has hosted the gamut of human feelings: jubilation, sorrow, fear, reassurance, beginnings and endings and everything in between. I am thinking now of the 2001 Mexican film Y Tu Mama Tambien, in which the soundtrack periodically goes silent while a voiceover narrator points out what happened in the same locations years ago. Is the narrator meant to be God's voice? Perhaps; we can imagine that if God looks at any location on Earth, He (or She) is mourning others' tragedies while acknowledging our wellness. There are no happy or sad spots on Earth, only spots where happiness and sadness have taken place. We may personally attach emotion to a particular location, but that emotion resides in us, not in the location.

My poem this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder is "Ghost Town Pantoum," and I was about to call it a happy poem in a sad location before I stopped myself. Yes, the characters in the poem are enjoying themselves; they walk hand in hand through a ghost town (maybe a tourist trap), kiss by the jail, and in general take in the sights. Is a ghost town a sad place? Like all places, it's hosted sadness. There is a jail, of course. Crimes were committed here. Saloons brought their share of trouble, at least in the pioneer days. Then again, the beds show ample evidence of use, and the medicine show posters once glowed fresh and bright -- a promise of a rollicking afternoon. Someone was lucky, many times before, to be in this prairie town. As for us, we get a kiss out of it, maybe even an ice cream at the gift shop. We're lucky to be here now.

I sometimes have my students do an exercise in which they draw a picture of themselves in the center of a page and form a series of rings around it. In each ring, they draw other people who play various parts in their life. First is the inner circle: parents, siblings, close friends. Next is the second tier: teachers, extended family, neighbors. The outer ring contains the bit players, some of whom might only be known by a first name or depended on for a specific service. As I remind the class, each of those bit players is the central figure in his or her own life, plus a member of the inner circle in any number of others. Perhaps they were born into that inner circle as a child or sibling. Perhaps they entered it as a spouse. Or perhaps that connection began in the sandbox at nursery school, in the lunch line at summer camp, or in a pickup basketball game at the park. "I've been trying hard to find the people that I won't leave behind," Brian Wilson once sang mournfully. That is an acute state of loneliness. Most of us find at least a few such people without trying hard at all.

I could easily complete my own assignment and fill in those rings with the people closest to me. I have a clear enough mental image of where those stick figures would go. When I was younger, there was a feeling of inevitability about them, and not just with family; some part of me felt like every favorite teacher, every intimate friend, somehow had to be in that inner ring. When a bond between two people grows strong or deep enough, the circumstances of their meeting take on a sanctified quality, as if the cosmos were pushing them together in anticipation of the rewards to follow. I am old enough now to recognize that as romantic absurdity. People enter our lives by haphazard chance, and sometimes we make the most of those random encounters. That person whom we have confided in for decades might have been a bit player in our lives if the teacher had assigned her to a seat one row over in kindergarten.

"Interview with the Songwriter," my poem featured this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder, is about that notion. It was inspired by my days as an entertainment reporter for the Los Angeles Times and its community papers -- a time when I had a great many superficial encounters with a great many interview subjects. These were my kind of people, for sure: artists, poets, entrepreneurs, dreamers, ones with whom I might fill hours dissecting literature or pushing the boundaries of formal conversation. Instead, I spoke to each of them on deadline, with an assignment to get the information I needed, craft a catchy lede, and slip the quotes into the right places. I wrote a lot of stories during those encounters, and made no close friends. Yes, some of those people belong to my email list or view my posts on Facebook, where to "friend" someone is a verb. Compared to the relationships that we truly treasure, which often host an entire private language of references and in-jokes, that monosyllable seems pale indeed.

I think "Interview with the Songwriter" was based on a true story. Perhaps it's telling that I can't quite say. As I recall, one time, I spent an hour or so talking with a local songwriter who had a new album or upcoming show, and I realized that many of our tastes overlapped. For lack of a name, I'll call him Pete. He was warm and gregarious, as hungry artists often are when you give them publicity. As I scribbled notes, I wondered if Pete and I might have become close friends if we had met earlier in life. Could we have written songs together? Perhaps my words might have fit his melodies. By the time we met, we were too busy to think of that -- "both of us with rings and planners," as the poem puts it. We could have met again, but that would have required crossing something off the planners.

That's what Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" is about, as much as we misread it as an inspirational poem. We make myopic choices and hope that they pay off. We fantasize about going back in time and trying the other road, when really we know that we're stuck with our choice. As time goes on, we accumulate those "mights" more and more. We might have picked another college, pursued another career, sought another person as our collaborator. Would we have ended up happier? There is no way to know. At this moment, I am completing this blog entry, and Pete may be at work on another song. He may not need a cowriter to help with the lyrics.

My 2013 book The First Thing Mastered contains two poems about infancy. One is "Newborn," which is the book's closing poem (about the moment of childbirth) and which I blogged about last week. The other is "Waking," which opens the book and captures the first days or weeks of life from an infant's point of view, or tries to.

"Tries" is the key word. This is one case where I am not sure if I did or did not, whatever Master Yoda may say. A more reasonable bit of wisdom may come from the poet Archibald MacLeish, who wrote in "Ars Poetica": "A poem should be equal to: Not true." I don't take that as a charge that all poets are fibbers, but rather an acceptance of the line between reality and art. The two exist on different sides of a divide: The first provides the second with material, and the second colors our perception of the first. We artists may be magicians on our best days (or tell ourselves that we are), but we operate in the field of illusions. At times, I think back on a conversation with a college classmate who insisted that Life Is Beautiful was a better film than Schindler's List, since no film could accurately capture the truth of the Holocaust, and Life Is Beautiful had the sense not to try.

Why try, then? Maybe it's a form of power: our little desire to play God and create our own worlds (even if they often abide by the rules of His/Hers). We can't conjure up an actual horse, but we may create a painting of a horse that reaches more eyes than any real animal. Michelangelo's David is more beautiful than any flesh-and-blood man could be. No night sky has ever swirled like Van Gogh's "The Starry Night." Both artworks are equal to: Not true. We have held onto them as truths now for hundreds of years.

I realize that I'm citing some lofty names here. I am not nominating myself to be in a league with Michelangelo, Van Gogh, or Roberto Benigni. But their examples let me off the hook a bit when I sat down to write "Waking." As noted in my previous blog, this poem displaced "Newborn" as the opener in The First Thing Mastered, since I felt that that poem provided too much adult perspective to begin the collection. I wanted to start by evoking naïveté and innocence -- obviously, not an easy task for a college-educated writer in his mid-30s. And there lies the limitations of the poet. We may use simple words to evoke a simple time of life, but they are words regardless, nothing that accompanied us out of the womb. The best that we can do is hint at a life where context is absent and everything is taken at face value. At some point, we must wonder about everything that we see and hear and touch, before we start to apply names and figure out cause and effect.

I couldn't write a true poem about those moments of life, so I wrote the best not-true one that I could. We have all forgotten our first days in the bedroom, but this poem about a bedroom contains a crack that our eyes focus on every morning. This poem contains a milk bottle and a chandelier that catches the red sunlight. Is any of it accurate? You and I both could have answered that question once. By the time we could express it in words, it was too late.

In the story of my life, I have a three-and-a-half-year memory gap. It is not the result of drugs or amnesia, but simple cognitive development; I cannot remember anything that happened until I was nearly four years old. The earliest specific memory that I have is of seeing Return of the Jedi at the Brea Mall theater in the summer of 1983, and before that, there are a few vague random images. I recall a spacious bedroom at my house in Fullerton (clearly, in this case, because I lived there after the age of 3). There was a plastic toy, I think, that I put up to my eyes and scrolled pictures inside. No doubt there were a few Star Wars items as well. Otherwise, I remember nothing: no diapers, no stroller rides, no first words or first steps. I do remember all of those things about my daughter's first three years, but she has forgotten them already.

Of course, I am not alone in pointing out this memory gap; it's a universal phenomenon that psychologists refer to as childhood amnesia. But it does provide a perplexing dilemma for writers when touching on the formative years. In 2013, I published my second full-length book, The First Thing Mastered, which consists of 44 poems that track life in chronological order from birth to early middle age. When Richard Linklater made the film Boyhood, which follows a similar progression, he chose to begin when his protagonist was 7, but I opted to start the story at the very beginning. Eventually, I came up with "Newborn," which appears this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder and depicts what I imagine are the first sensations in a baby's life: a bright room, unfamiliar colors, strangers gathered around, the cut of the umbilical cord. I earmarked it as the opening poem in the book, and there it sat for a while.

Then, I started having second thoughts about that placement. "Newborn" may cover the first moments after birth, but it does it only partly from a baby's point of view; there's also a great deal of perspective that only an adult can apply. It starts with an illumination / the brightest there will ever be -- an infant doesn't know comparison yet. ...the first taste of effortless flight / and the first fleeting touch down -- parents, not infants, keep track of "firsts." Adults have a lot to say about the births of children; we've lived long enough to wax philosophical about them. Every year, my 8th-graders and I listen to Paul Simon's song "Born at the Right Time," in which he regards a new arrival on Earth and sings:

     Never been lonely
     Never been lied to
     Never had to scuffle in fear
     Nothing denied to

We talk about what Simon is leaving out with all those negatives. If we regard a newborn child and note that he or she has never been lonely, lied to, afraid or bereft, we are implicitly stating that all those experiences will come in time. Elsewhere in the song, Simon describes walking through an airport and observing babies who "follow me with open eyes / their uninvited guest." Therein lies the difference. We philosophize about babies, and they stare back at us.

I was immensely proud of "Newborn," but as the manuscript took shape, I realized that it couldn't work as the opening poem. So it became the final one -- the end of the cycle, so to speak, as we encounter early childhood again with the perspective that decades bring. To replace it in the opening slot, I wrote "Waking," which imagines (to the extent possible) what a baby sees through those staring eyes. I'll blog about that one next week.