Reluctantly the book opens you to another voice
to the promise of past miracles
a long lost friend
an ex-lover perhaps
impersonating the silent screen star
you saw late last night on TCM -
the silent screen star who later
swept you away across a field and into a pine forest
where you spread a blanket
and listened to freight trains
wailing through crossings
on the outskirts of your childhood.
Was it enough to revisit that strange neighborhood
where interruptions withered you with IOUs?
The voluptuousness of the model in the painting on the cover
erases the bric-a-brac and cheap souvenirs
from your memory of the shore -
a memory you are better off without.
Later in the book, an old man - your father? -
squirrels away pocket change in a poorly-lit closet
his wife, again, missing from the family portrait
their daughters, in the next room, arguing,
party dresses at Goodwill.
Like him you worry that tomorrow
is a boat on a rough sea
without sail or oars
a car idling at a traffic light
its tires flat.
Your high school classmates are in there as well
hovering in the white unbroken snow of morning.
Are you surprised to find them in there?
Are you surprised to find your high school yearbook
bristling with Post-its?
its pages dog-eared from your searches?
Faces from your childhood
pop up in the last chapter
knocking on your back door
looking in through your back window
like the shadows from your favorite films
that lately, late at night, awaken you
as they enter and exit the roundabout
just outside your window.
