Tim Suermondt

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Memory Comes and Goes, But It Never Disappears

In another country, a small one,
I go inside a small museum
and am struck by a painting

of a wide creek, patches of grass
on the bank, a few trees, and a girl,
(six, seven) staring into the distance.

And the more I examine the painting
the more I realize I could have been
in her place, and that I was, waiting

for my father to take me by the hand
and walk me across the huge suspension
bridge into the city, and how the creek

has faded much in the fog of time, along
with the trees, and even my father
blurred sometimes to a shadow.

Yet it’s all back now, my father about
to enter the frame, the girl and I astonished,
the robust bridge strong as it ever was.

Tim Suermondt’s seventh full-length book of poems A Day in The Republic came out in late 2025 from Dos Madres Press. He has published in Poetry, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Georgia Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Stand Magazine, Smartish Pace, Barrow Street, Amsterdam Review and Plume, among many others. He lives in Cambridge (MA) with his wife, the poet Pui Ying Wong.