lock of disciplined hair is teased loose,
a gust makes the body lean against it
just as one leans against the future.
One need not move to be in motion.
The sun, too, misbehaves, crimping the eyes,
flashing on glass. Throwing its hard shadows.
So one comes to the black and white of 1939
not nearly as surprised as they were, captured
in their happy pose, disarmed by wind and sun,
– the world spinning madly but in some larger frame –
disarming in their attitudes. One need not move
to be in motion. In that photograph
lines and life remain vivid, while time
bumps us along, out of control.
His War
My father returned from that war
in a cloud of radiant dust.
In the days of the Empire’s setting sun
his troop ship steams to port in its afterglow.
His war – the story he carried inside
but never told. Never explained. Silence
absolute, a cancer, as if his story like Japan itself
had been shredded, vaporized, cindered
in holocaust. Sun, unleashed.
Now we assemble the pieces of his war,
the skeletal trees, the oily pools
the sudden aging, the blasted lungs. How,
born on the wind, shall that story unfold?
Reconstructing Collective Memory
I can’t speak for others
but my own rough scraps
of collective memory,
my handful of details, drop away
steadily in the dusk.
The memories I keep are soiled
by the worry
of my hands. I hope
for better from you,
but I suspect you are –
like me – inattentive.
Thus, the big questions
cannot be answered alone.
I show you my ideas.
You can show me yours.
We can hope we still hold enough
between us to figure out
who we are. What this all means.
Or to figure out
what pieces have slipped away.
Still, these I set between us
on the table of common interest
like so many pebbles,
as my witness,
polished now and dark.
Wyoming, 1952
When I was a small child
when seat belts were a luxury, unsought,
my older brothers took the window seats
while I hung forward into the grownup space
my feet on the hump down the center of the floor.
This is how I learned what I needed
about survival, about us, about the natural order,
Father behind the wheel, Mother reading maps,
comfortable talk passing like fence posts
ordinary as sage brush.
Just a still point in the rushing panorama.
For all I knew I could be anything I might imagine
aiming along the hood’s raised spine
down the straight black highway
that opened into the future a mile a minute
reaching all the way to a horizon
always just a few more giant strides ahead.
Long Shadows
Distinct in its improvisations, an old memory
of late afternoon sun finding its notch
in the mountains west of Laramie
pauses there for one beat, one contraction –
the long shadows of the peaks
wrap the earth in their black fingers
until all that rises above the soil
that clings by roots and foundations
that hugs dirt with its belly
sinks in the shadows as into water.
And all that doesn’t, all that transcends,
turns royal blue, or bronze, the sun itself
pulling back from across the open sky
until it too slides, suddenly, from sight –
and I let out my breath. After all that cosmic pageantry,
I see it blooming, radiant in darkening air.
And I turn toward familiar yellow windows,
warm rooms full
