Eighteen Thousand Sundowns

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For my father, 1914-94 

Near a rock slope of hill pasture, 
grass grows up through a few old bones. 
Again, what’s moved past recall 
is not past pain. White as the noon-day 
moon, the bones are too small 
to belong to the mare someone shot for sport 
on this hillside years ago, 
too small for the Holstein, Sally, 
gone blind from tumors. 

Above me in the steep hollow 
small winter avalanches have left the ground 
clean of brush, the earth abraded 
to shale and stone. 
Scents of sage and drying sun . . . 

and it’s as though all my days have pointed 
to these moments and these views 
above my father’s farm, grandfather’s before— 
irrigation ditches filled in, hardly a trace 
of the stackyard where deer broke through slats 
to raid haystacks, but died anyway 
those winters snow deepened to fence tops.

*

The past slips ahead of us 
and we meet it in the present. 
Traces of cattle trails weave between fences; 
the sinking ribbed roof of the barn 
opens to fading light. 
Where new highways blunt-cut through fields,
perennial with alfalfa, larks cry sounds 
identical to thousands I’ve heard before. 

Returning is like that paradox 
of warming oneself taking long winter walks: 
the childhood breaths that wrote visibly on the air,
how you kept wanting to look back 
to see what you’d said. 

If I wait into dark 
for the glistening coal-blue 
of the night sky, the far Pleiades 
will be sending millennia of pin-point light 
still being gathered by anything it touches.