Deciding Origins (2)

Then it's the nose     /the profile     /any if all resembling
/this Nilsson humor say     /this Schweitzer hairline

or the profile     /there in the kids of kids of kids—     And
then it's his own     /her own     /this gazing

preserved in scenes love's scanned     /reaching the hearts
of centuries     /the last to suppose we might

come close in searching family     /to urge the identities ahead
/in even these Thirties kin     /gathered in parlor light

filling the bay on Robinwood     /even as generations meld
/your mother deciding origins     /discovering

for us which afternoons     /which August docks     /decks
/which faces these had to be     /weighed wise

in the Depression     /wise in this half and more blind feeling
into seasons     /naming that whole glad flock

made glad and radiant     /wieghed in the drift of years
and ticks of dreams and shutter-speeds.  Minutes

as keen     /as seemed     /as misremembering inspires     /minutes
as ceaseless liberties     /as hand-me-down old forms

where she is helped along by our regard for detailing     /minutes
and all that vibrancy     /the textures and mat-boards

crumbling     /all that consenting heat     /all of the autumns
spent where time itself had seemed to flower

/seemed to have burned the more for all the friction in their accents
/scanned in these comely registers—     Liz/Elizabeth     —and

sharing their own good sense of it     /their own glad branchings
say      /and their own joys  in the circumference     /even

as we—     so lost to time—     as these who receive old forms
and these subdued resemblings     /who hint

in their own the looks of pioneers and yachtsmen     /glad
for the tenses     /textures withering     /glad

that so many thought it worth their while to make known
and even as we—      so lost to time      /lost

in the one embrace and sequence of caresses—     to
feel the porch and parlor colors' influence.

 

© Appetite (2)