Just like we were on the Great Plains
in 1949, my father and I would gather
summer nights with neighbors
lining our country road to watch
constellations disbanding. Whether tragedy
or a tragic lack of imagination, it’s hard
to say—he and I simply could not see
any threads or their severing. Then,
as now, telephone wires also lined the road
linking the night one lighted island
at a time, though the wires are now dead
gestures, props to a faded empire
of distant voices made close but never
close enough to turn that light
into warmth. What’s left—sinking
into my own humidity, my own
expanse of darkness, and he
to his own. As you read this
it is surely a summer night some place
the land extends forever
until it gives up where the visible
begins to visibly waver, either
from the heat or from the failure
of the possibilities of sight.
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