Ash and Embers. James A. Zoller

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ