A Highway of Stones

Near summer, near the gutters
bounding tense streets, near
the separation between tires
and asphalt.  Always near,
like breath on a window in
winter, when suddenly the
invisible becomes visible for
just a moment, just an emotion
bounding along, girl, skirt
swirling and sunshine and all
the various dreams which so
carelessly leak from motion,
from history’s weight, rainfall,
from Arlington Cemetery, from
one war piled onto the next,
from where I was when.  And
no memories are good, just one
ending after another, sprinkled
with the pepper of new fears.

Don’t ask me where I was when
the first man walked on the moon,
nor when Martin Luther King was
shot, though I stood on the steps
of the Lincoln monument and
imagined the dream.  Don’t expect
me to remember each change,
each reverberation the mind makes
to accommodate jumping from one
reality to the next.  I’m still reading
a letter I received in 1970, from a
Georgian whom I worked with on
a tobacco farm near Drumbo,
Ontario and how his only choice
seemed to be enlisting, or waiting
to be drafted into the infrastructure
for another calculated shift in history.