Memory - a life in the day

Memory by day is yoked to duty, a patient ox
that turns the water wheel of sequence, processes;
the day shift commandeers the memory's practical capacity
for pattern, repetition, the routine, the concrete, the mundane.

Even so, it has no fixed abode or occupation;
by the time a task is set in train, it may be far away,
following a fallen leaf across a park in gusts of wind,
flying with migrating cranes, dancing with the dervish rain
or visiting some quite specific private site of joy or pain.

By night, the frequencies arrange themselves in different vein.
Memory hums quietly to itself in keys unheard by day, 
sinks deeper, dives to trochus-beds and coral reefs within the brain,
retrieves a strange miscellany of items sea has stowed away -
curios, mnemonics that form one link in an endless chain -
laying out its treasures and its trophies in unique array,
delighted to recover what was long misplaced, or filed awry,
a child allowed to play with grandma's trinket-box.

A day with memory erased is like an unmarked grave;
a night - a ship devoid of navigation aids.
Cultures ground themselves in something less reliable than sand -
memory, a vagrant hound that heeds no call, obeys no hand,
at home with free association, not averse to paradox.