There were others I’d forgotten, who,
without vocabularies
to commend them to my broken landscapes,
went missing
throughout the daylight hours, then struck
their faint electric jags
upon the silhouettes of water birches.
What is he doing there along the bypass?
Or that one, thumbing up into the hills.
Spikelets.
The field and the fire devoured them.
I don’t drive, nor return, nor conclude.
I wouldn’t know now the etiquette
of being in someone else’s car,
much less someone’s memory.
How do they stand it, these apparitions.
Summoned from the nude buckwheat
with blatant inaccuracy
then dispatched with a gesundheit blink.
He could have taken the train.
He could have just decided he’d rather walk.
He was an EMT who owned a pinball machine.
He was the jeweler’s son.
Carried hardly any cash.
He was a fragment friend, that one.
I only saw him after hours.
From Dunnigan. Woodland. Galt. Esparto.
Recollection isn’t mine to master.
Worse than all the figures I could choose,
the gangly birds.
They are the heedless shapes we come upon
suddenly, and without warning,
their dun quills overstating
that final moment of distress.
And then the scattering.
And then the progress,
which is always away.
Where did that one go?
He went away.
Away now, then,
my feathered friend. You are not now,
nor have you ever been.