From a bouquet by my bed
The scent of trance-locating sage
Rises like a genie from a bottle.
Stirred from half-sleep dreams
I move along past shadows
Cut away from substance.
Traveling on the edge of light
Long out,
Sweeping backward out of sight,
I am touched by deja vu,
And pause at one familiar plain
To reminisce a memory
Persisting against loss,
An echo searching for its source.
To haunting calls of meadow larks
I strike out on an instinct,
A summons by the wind,
A light beamed by a distant star,
Until my father and my mother,
In their old blue Ford,
Find me hitchhiking
Down a dream of expectation,
A time-traveler's road to a home
Never left.

Separation feeds on time;
each day a ritual tested
to the breaking point:
a scent, a flash of memory,
retrieved, an image slipped away,
a passion, resisting change
by Heraclitus' fire;
the smell of cedar, sage,
the frost of mid-October morning.
Shades returned from far away
honor such reluctance to give up,
to leave the living for this
emptied place of silent song.
Early life, firm-formed here,
first love strong-gripped still;
the heart is torn by motion
at the outer edge, strayed
from the sanctity of innocence,
where the eye first met the earth
full of birds, and creatures called
by dusk and dawn —
beyond the crib and wall.
One thing empties to another;
I am poured out to myself,
a vessel full and emptied;
distraught—I cannot live alone.

The obituary fixes time, history
we are destined to forget save for
those who cherish moments they’ve
interred in memory, kept the dead alive:
a drama in the mind, a cherished souvenir,
pressed flowers in a book—
they will not let them perish.

The paper is yellow and brittle,
a margin away from your own death
told—it too in time, will edit into dust.
I pick up fragments of our lives,
more durable than death, become
the artifacts of ritual, of silent meditation.

I bring you back with just the crushing
of a leaf of sage, juniper berries
broken between my teeth.
The old campsites scroll by,
fires burned low; you and I gazing
into the coals. I stir the embers
when the glow grows dim—
to keep your face from fading into the ash.

The black paper covers broke in time—
time, and impatient children's hands,
too quick in turning, wore and tore
the fragile pages, dislodged pictures
catching in the frayed string binding.
I lived those pictures long ago,
moments in my father's life,
the mountains and the open range,
before I had a mother, until time
brought me into being in space,
gave me an image of my own.

Then, there were the new we added
of ourselves until the last page filled,
and photographs lay loose
collecting at the bottom of a box.
One day, who knows when,
after years of sitting on our parents laps,
and at the kitchen table pointing
at yesterday, asking who is that,
listening to the stories each face held,
someone said we needed a new album
(and we did, if looking after pictures
is what an album is about), replace the old
and worn with something new and strong.

We uprooted all the pictures from their space,
where they were placed when first they came
from the developer (most before my time),
and moved them to a new home, a hard covered
album, metal bound, with plastic covered pages.

Secured for years, I look at them and reminisce–
the who, and what, the story on our father's knee.
But something's gone—the Old Black Paper Album,
worn out, thrown away, with pictures loosened
from their corner anchors, affixed before my birth,
worn out, like the bodies of the faces peering out.
This is not their album; I detached them,
put them here, out of place in the new,
unaware the rift in time and space would one day
rend the binding, one day displace me.

Peering through eye-lid slits
against a Big Horn Flats high-sky sun,
anvil hot, burning with the wind,
fixed on two black spirit birds flying north
across my earth bound point of gravity,
heads cocked, a probing eye, to scan
this pilgrim curiosity.
One loosed feather drifting down,
pierces through a memory: you and I,
driving north, across the Big Horn Flats
from Sage Creek toward the Wind.
I hesitate to watch the apparition fade
beyond the rim, the interstice stretched out
to thwart my earthbound call, admit that
only birds have crossed this temporality
to vanish in my future.What attraction
did you have for me that I should travel here
when I am old to see your face in every
creature, sage and flower?