Ash and Embers. James A. Zoller
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 of voices, comfort, and food.
My Grandfather’s Hand
By the end he addressed envelopes from edge
to edge, at a forward slant precisely suited
to the matronly school mistress who had disciplined
his boyishness, who watched from over his shoulder –
like a predator – his orphaned hand.
The perfect loops and paralleled spikes
of my grandfather’s textbook cursive held
for eighty years – growing large as if bold-
ness were a remedy for failing eyes, a trembling pen,
a dangerously erratic heart.
He varied not a whit – even in the grip
of his last illness – as if, still, to please her
whose stern attentions were as close as he
might ever imagine to a mother’s.
Another Occasion
Accept this from me
as you might accept
on another occasion
a small, dried fish
from the hand of an old man.
You are in his kitchen
sitting at his bare table.
It is clean after
the fashion of old men.
Sunlight rides to the floor
on motes of dust.
The fish, on a small plate.
You must be hungry,
he urges, please eat.
Accept this from me:
Twenty years after his death
my father appeared
in a dream. He stood
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