that the smile was not practiced at all—

real delight bloomed there. She was curious;

she suffered our approach (the gush and coo,

the babbling, the director bending down

to meet the camera flash) until someone

tried to touch her, and then the attendants

pushed us back, gently. She nodded,

lifted a hand as if to console us

before letting it drop, slowly, to her lap.

Resting there. The idea of consolation

soothing us: her gesture

already become her touch,

like the history she made for us sitting there,

waiting for the moment to take her.

The Pond, Porch-View:
Six P.M., Early Spring

I sit, and sit, and will my thoughts

the way they used to wend

when thoughts were young

(i.e., accused of wandering).

The sunset ticks another notch

into the pressure treated rails

of the veranda. My heart, too,

has come down to earth;

I’ve missed the chance

to put things in reverse,

recapture childhood’s backseat

universe. Where I’m at now

is more like riding on a bus

through unfamiliar neighborhoods—

chair in recline, the view chopped square

and dimming quick. I know

I vowed I’d get off

somewhere grand; like that dear goose

come honking down

from Canada, I tried to end up

anyplace but here.

Who am I kidding? Here I am.

Notes

Notes and
Acknowlednments

Notes

“The Camel Comes to Us from the Barbarians”: This allegorical poem was inspired by an Aesop fable entitled “The First Appearance of the Camel”; it relates how man’s terror of this strange and powerful creature gradually turns to contempt once the means to control and domesticate the animal were discovered.

“There Came a Soul”: Ivan Albright (1897-1983) began his painting of Ida Rogers in 1929. Although the model was a twenty-year-old wife and mother, the Chicago artist decided to portray her as a lonely old woman. Art scholars cite Albright’s experience as a medical illustrator during World War I as a possible motive for his later preoccupation with old age.

“On the Bus with Rosa Parks”: In 1995, during a convention in Williamsburg, Virginia, as the conferees were boarding buses to be driven to another site, my daughter leaned over and whispered, “Hey, we’re on the bus with Rosa Parks!” Although the precipitating incident did not make it into a poem, the phrase haunted me—and so this meditation on history and the individual, image and essence was born. (By the way, Mrs. Parks took a seat in the front of the bus.)