one before, one AFTER, but
never just between.
A space, an emptiness, divides the two signs, and I realize that it’s easier to waste time
when there’s plenty to be had, plenty to get back to, in a lush world you invented, than it is to
keep waiting for a place you’ve left behind.
3.
Plus, the new town had no mailmen. All its
dreamt-up people—like snails in afterglow, glorging and slurping through
life —never penned a word. And as is a nomadic tribe’s fate, my made-up town just vanished,
and now all the little birds have fled, replaced by crows that dart above empty stage. And for a
moment it gets me down. But I think about the old town, and I remember all the names,
remember Sand Springs, Oklahoma, and I know a letter’s coming.
I think about my Cousin Jack, who is sturdy the way a man
should be, calm as late-winter evenings, with a belly laugh and gentleness, spined by hillsides
and a job at the steel mill or wherever he is now.
I remember the summer noontime when some drunk weekenders raced their speedboat into Jack,
he was out on the jetski with his then-girlfriend Claudia. The boat’s aluminum nose struck
ribcage and shoulder, and hurled him into the tan silk of Lake Keystone.
I was eight or nine at the time, so no one told me truths, but I remember how Claudia’s voice
shook that night in the sterile room as she whispered: “I was right there holding onto him and
then—like that—he was gone and up in the air.” When her voice got quieter I leaned in, “The
doctor said if the boat had hit him two inches higher
it would have got his head.”
“Will he walk again,” someone asked her.
The doctors made it sound like Legos, how the vertebrae had to find their way back in.
Jack rode the bulls all his life, had traversed prairies on horseback for weeks or a season, had
risen into night as it glinted untold stars, had smelled the cow manure quiver with the heat of the
first sunrise. And a broken back is nothing to a mountain.
So when he learned to walk again, his stride was even better, like something you can carry.
4.
One of her letters waits outside the door.
She wrote me again and it’s autumn, and a memory arises
and I’m there now again, seven or
eight, just me and my Aunt Pat, driving through one of the valleys in the town
I am from: out of small talk, we reach the top of a hill and she points to the tree line:
oceans of dark red and yellow, of
moody orange that came from
light green, a scatter of feathers across the hillside, a tawny
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