The Lost Scent

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.