Yours Truly 2016 / Cascadia College / Bothell, WA | Page 34

2.
Salt and waves, fern-swath coastline, rust red trees,
landscape I return to, remembering.
Fog is sadness.
Tendril vine, image appearing in my dreams and I wake,
lost in the forest, pen in hand, no paper, trying to find
what is retrievable only through writing, a process
to unfurl, feel toward open space.
3.
My mother tells me sometimes things run amuck.
She teaches me to photograph the sun-damaged ropes strewn
about the dock, the frayed mainsails elegant, worthy of observation.
She learned this as a young woman to overcome the shock of her father’s
gunshot accident.
My mother faces the camera, Piazza San Marco pigeons gathered around
her, lilac wings against motes of dust.
4.
My granddaughters, Maizie and Ciena, visit the Vietnam Memorial and locate
Ken’s name at the midpoint of the wall with the names of more than 58,000
men and women killed in action during the Vietnam War. Their father serves
in the Army, stationed at the Pentagon.
My daughter calls to share information found on the internet: Ken was killed
in an ambush that took the lives of twenty-two Marines in the Battle of Khe
Sanh. Do I know there is a 2015 documentary film about it, The Siege of Khe
Sanh?

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