When its arched brow rises
from behind the country hill,
snub-nosed, a grin
for a grill, you remember
you’re in second grade.

There is Cindy’s old yellow dog
feigning outrage at your passing van,
his bark and lunge petering
to that bored, panting trot.
And there the synod
of grammar schoolers wrestling
lunchboxes into a line,
reinventing the rituals, the
hierarchies, the variations
of elemental courtship.

There the oil-rosy puddles
in rutted gravel,
the soaked toes, knots
of gossiping daffodils, tufts
of too enthusiastic grass,
the bristles smudged in sage and mustard
along the far edge of fields.

When you top the hill
you know you’ll see the bus swing
a backward right in your mirror, right
onto the main road, so
you lean, small-palm
the cracked leatherette,
grasp the memory of cool steel
framing the seat ahead,
all your uncertain world
still straddling the smeared window
slid halfway down.

The same low sun stuns you
when you glance back, forward, run
your times-nines, wheel left
and head for school.
                        

As I flew into town
that first time, leaning over
the gull-winged sweep
of the handlebars, the burn in my
pudgy, mad-pumping thighs,
told me I was fast, was
free, was finally entering
the my country ’tis of thee
we’d all been singing,
sweet land of weekend-
playground liberty.
That mile I’d never ridden
was a hundred miles,
the fresh spring breeze speed itself
as those fat tires
snarled through dunes
of shoulder gravel and
eddies of fallen leaves.
When I jumped the curb
onto the school’s front sidewalk
town kids, exotic friends named
Cindy, Billy, Darlene, and Gary,
were already gathered, long
unchaperoned, at ease,
their pre-adolescences already
underway, their slow turn
toward my approach blasé
as I came skidding into
that newest of my old
neighborhoods of memory.
                          

When Dad had his easy operation
he quit smoking, cold turkey,
and Peggy and I traced and crayoned

the encyclopedia’s glossy plates.
I gave him a cardinal, a goldfinch,
a blue jay and still know those basic colors,

their cocked depictions. Today,
near blind, he’s ready
to hand back over whatever can’t be moved—

some ‘20’s textbooks, Grandpa’s elaborate camera,
the table saw that hasn’t cut much in years and years.
And I’m trying my best to feel sad

about now but grope around another corner
instead: I see I should settle again,
start collecting for sons who, in another

twenty-five years, will need to help
clear out a house, haul away
quaint power tools, inlaid tables,

floor lamps, a love seat, an assortment
of dusty cup hooks and nails,
and several odd poems featuring birds.