Winds off the dumps bring back a childhood
gone, long gone:
the reek of acid-tinged mine water,
smolder of the culm in lowly humps
beside the graveyard
where my father’s fathers drift in seams.
I’ve tried to lose so many things,
too many things,
and now this wind refuses to die down;
it carries in its multiple, gray folds
these whiffs and gleanings
from another life, once all my own.