silence except for
the tiny change of pressure
as flakes pass my ear
or the slight sizzle as they touch
down on my head and shoulder
or the more distant sound
as subtle as dust accumulating
on the mantle piece
of snow gathering on limb and leaf
and even my steps are muted
by the years that have passed
and muted also is the reason
I am walking here
but the memory ephemeral
as the fragile snow feathery
as the tamarack leaf peculiar
in its persistence
flickers and fades
flickers and fades
then passes as an old photo
passes in an album
I Would Step into the Wooden Boat
I would step into the wooden boat
pull up the near shore of the Pend Oreille
along the marshes with the white stumps
of trees that once stood on drier ground
but had succumbed to the water’s inundation
now perches for water birds and crows
resting from flight or warily watching my alien work
and if not on the river hike high up the hill
overlooking the big bend where the river turns east
to a side hill clearing logged of its fir
where a large rock clings suggesting a place to sit
and look down the valley
almost to the old Diamond Match mill at Cusick
and brood in the style of a 19th century novel
forgetting the trivialities of model airplanes
or my collection of stamps deliberations
I set aside for the pew and the pastor’s sermon
My Father’s War
I
The humming birds came to his feeder
regularly enough that he knew each one
by sight he didn’t name them but recognized
their coloring and habits of interaction
and he looked for them to return each day
to the yellow plastic flowers and the holes
where they poked their little beaks
for a sip of red sugar nectar
and when they didn’t return
and it was clear that they would never return
he would go sit in an old folding chair
under the apricot tree remember
standing near the tower looking east
counting his big silver birds as they returned
noting the numbers on their tall tails
and their peculiar markings
II
I see him mopping up the blood
of an 18-year-old gunner
pooled up against the fuselage ribs
under the wooden floorboards
some of it still frozen in fingered patterns
ice crystals visible on the dark surface
his own blood retreating from his skin
until he is the cabin deep in the woods
doors and windows frozen shut
only a thin curl of smoke in the chimney
and in some interior room sits an old man
hunched over a small stove
warming his cold hands
III
He laid his ear
against the cool skin
of the fuselage
reaching blind
into a handful of wire
cut up
by a 20 mm shell
from a 109
he heard it
like he’d heard it
before
the rumble
of the big
Wright Cyclone engines
the whine
of the 109
piercing the formation
cannons
pounding tracers
leading to the target
a shell parting
the thin aluminum
bursting
in the soft tissue
of the left waist gunner
ripping out
