Note Scrawled Next to a Photograph

best trip ever
we saw Venice / the pyramids
the Panama Canal / Bruce orchids
Havana afternoon / Washington
waddling the Potomac
late summer Munich / Portsmouth

and people wandered the streets
of each and every time rejoicing to be tourists
uninvolved rejoicing / their shadows
shading the doorsteps of historical relics

I have a thought and a photograph
a philosophy and a memory
a reference point which begins
in my living room and terminates
south of an airport / city center
causeway to paradise / the equator

but nowhere near the shell
of my aging body / the footsteps
which are an echo bouncing off
the fragile walls of history

like the afterimages my mother
sees every day since
the blood-letting days when
a world war arrived in her Slovakia
and she lost her world to arrive