Ash and Embers. James A. Zoller

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 of voices, comfort, and food.

      My Grandfather’s Hand

      By the end he addressed envelopes from edge

      to edge, at a forward slant precisely suited

      to the matronly school mistress who had disciplined

      his boyishness, who watched from over his shoulder –

      like a predator – his orphaned hand.

      The perfect loops and paralleled spikes

      of my grandfather’s textbook cursive held

      for eighty years – growing large as if bold-

      ness were a remedy for failing eyes, a trembling pen,

      a dangerously erratic heart.

      He varied not a whit – even in the grip

      of his last illness – as if, still, to please her

      whose stern attentions were as close as he

      might ever imagine to a mother’s.

      Another Occasion

      Accept this from me

      as you might accept

      on another occasion

      a small, dried fish

      from the hand of an old man.

      You are in his kitchen

      sitting at his bare table.

      It is clean after

      the fashion of old men.

      Sunlight rides to the floor

      on motes of dust.

      The fish, on a small plate.

      You must be hungry,

      he urges, please eat.

      Accept this from me:

      Twenty years after his death

      my father appeared

      in a dream. He stood