The shotgun shines
radiant history across the mantle.
The wind rips through a rolodex of the names of the dead.
It could be a litany, almost
like the registers of Audubon societies
and the Who’s Who of West Virginia 1974
begging for a trumpet in morning,
a waltz and then a nap
in the hush of a million miraculously lit libraries.
The night before he dreamt of Crystal Pepsi and the Copernican turn,
post-its mistaken for sonnets
and ships sailing into shit.
And in waking,
a waking more this time than a polite not yet to the idea of death,
the atom of speech.
Not like an old man mumbling to himself in baseball metaphor,
but like a drop of rain in the palm,
reminding that above there are stars in the continual ricochet of triangulation,
bodies positioning themselves
in relation to a reference for which
we have no analog.
But one can take comfort in the miscalculation of the heights of see-saw fulcrums,
a child running around with a gold wrestling belt,
brave men on Massachusetts quarters,
Silver State on silver,
The wiper does not draw barren Nebraska across the windshield,
and the merry-go-round children are not about to be
pulled from their fiberglass horses in rapture.
I am acknowledging this.
And yet the story doesn’t end.
An act is a draft for the acts that follow.
We say forward and pinewood cars fly down their tracks.
After/at and a mother makes the wedding.
Like a bow.
I haven’t earned this but I’m hitching myself to your kindness.
There is a photo in my living room
on the back of which scribbled are the words
memory is an anachronism.
In the picture a child is
dragging a stick though the sand
in the vacuum of summer.
And I am sure that each grain had to pick a side.