October Sunday
Shadows walk long
Down a hazy lazy
Desert street
Replacing whispers
Of a winding dirt road
Several lives ago
Where fog burned away
By midday
Up high
Off green & blue.
I linger
Near the power
Of these remnants
Photographs,
Fragments
From the back side,
The tough rawhide
Of a half-century life
To see
To feel again
Trails outlined,
With Golden Rod,
And Queen Anne’s Lace,
Thin & weary
From the wrath
Of an end-of-summer sun
Another season’s downfall
In a tall leafy valley
Flanked by mountainsides
Where oak trees and maple leaves
Remain side by side
Of steamy seamy storms
That can drain the life from a person
Then bring it back again.
Memories have settled
Into a plastic Krogers bag
Black & whites,
Fiber-bared
From use and abuse
Hands of mothers & daughters
Aunts & cousins.
Silent lives portrayed
As permanent as the howl
Of a Blue Tick hound,
The Black Walnut tree out back,
And a ripped apart
Then mended
Family room full
Of tired laughter.
Photographs,
The trophy
Stained with the warm & the cold
After Thanksgiving naps
And torn Christmas wraps
To show what we’ve done
And where we’ve been
One family’s thumbprint
Fractured with history
Echoes, echoes
Of lives on paper
A solemn grandmother,
A toothless baby face,
A teenage aunt,
A shirtless skinny uncle
Some faces torn away
From a sawtooth edge
Worn with sorrow
Of lost chances
And second glances
Sipping a cracked cup of wishes.
Life’s whippings
Can beat the best
Out of us
Leave us wanting
And thinking
About dusty paths
To translucent destinations
About cake & porch swings
And nursery rhyme voices
Bubbling over creek rocks
Where a brown water snake
Lives the quiet life
Under rocks & tree stumps
Smiling at the thought
Of a young girl’s scream.
But on this Sunday evening
On Desert Cove Ave
The sun is the same
As it always has been
Both here and there
And everywhere
And this bag of old photographs
Is tied up
Stored away
In the basket of truth
I call home.
