Counting boxcars in Bakersfield I remember years spent watching trains

through desert north of Taos, west of Omaha cornrow hills, their rolling
into Barstow like injected candies of butterscotch, licorice, cordovan
crème de menthe in thirsting air of youth, and I just mused there, being.

I remember watching gulls over cobalt straits out of Port Angeles
oil-soaked air of Boston harbor, dropped wakes, carved anchors
hugging dry surety in floods of doubt, standing there dreaming.

Airplanes scribing margins like quills above Montana,
white horse running green lea of Vermont, rising Ohio rill
blade of grass like gemstone in twilight quivering and then still.

His resume and 8 by 10 in hand
willing to accept and be accepted
an aspiring actor moves from Dallas to LA
wanting agents, premieres, doo-dah parades
gay pride and whimsical sex under the jacarandas.
Altered his name legally upon arrival.

He found something pressurized and desolate in the LA chai.
Call it a menacing stasis, unrelenting glare of the horizon
chalky pastel stucco hues, an elusive center of gravity.
O the palm trees so many and so alone like all the wannabe actors
each a comma across the papyrus blanch of candied Southland sky.

At his worst, he wept and wept. Nothing would ever change
this was madness this place, madness, why oh why did he ever come?
Then one motionless noon after a bagel and lox at Cantor's Deli
driving up Fairfax through arid moraines
he felt an epiphany like a dizzying excess of rum in the heat.
He would not be for rent or sale, he would just be.
Cautiously, earnestly giving away his heart.

Tell me
who among us hasn't followed the sun west without apology
into various fables of enlightened disillusionment?

I am and you are.
One. Both. Indivisible.
.......Ready to name something love.

As if the bucolic roaming of childhood never occurred
I hear you John Sinden, son of mining men
resisting urges to preface each comment
with "I remember when --"
Here as a boy in Steamboat Springs
you swam spring-fed mirth of bountiful streams
wind tossing phlox in the fur of meadows
trudge steep from school through muddy ravines
you hid with Sioux, Pawnee and Cheyenne
shrewd and lively in velvet greens.

These days with three daughters
you sit upright behind the wheel, careful of diet
and posture and what you say to all children.
As you assess regrets in heavy traffic
you begin to weep, can't help it, unashamed
to admit nostalgia for once Elysian tropes,
the Colorado of boyhood days
grazing with elk on your Daddy's shoulders.

You've never seen such traffic and you struggle to breathe.
There were antelope here once, and you watched them
roam shadows where retail zones and condo mania
have erased buffalo, and Apache Medicine men
knew a few of them, too, in your time.

And the look of fear in your daughter's faces
doesn't stop you. So you pull the car
over and let valves burst and it all flows out.
Your girls each dry-mouthed and watching It's okay, Daddy,
we know what's wrong. But they don't
nor should they. This is your loss to mourn,

the Colorado in your heart, and little comfort
as you utter I'm fine, what's done is done.
You're not fine and you know this
but a good man, however burdened, moves on.

November strains, reaches
glides and gives rhapsodies taken,
winds of vast sin, erratic violins
a grouse finding me along this path,
wings flacking gun-fire-momentum
low brush cover hide-away abandoned,
and I stunned watch the grouse's escape --
how turgid, how thoughtless my limbs.

Later, from a distance, I watch wild turkeys
pecking mud between mashed and shattered
cornstalks like stunted imps, chipped
dog-teeth, connect-the-broken uniformity.
A few turkeys standing sentinel
while others feed along harrowed edges,
while crows lacking patience sound irritable
crow complaint, wings flaring open.

Ochre and rust of wet oak leaves
pools that will swell with bright ice,
the air harder now, a turn to it, winter
honing its threat, more wind rising,
crimson gestures from big black trees.
I think of what's ancient and transitory
our ever evolving conditional isolation
a promise that nothing really dies.

Her yes, a chore. A butter shortage
the year she lost her first daughter.
She knows her gifts. She listens at the well.

Some will say they have beaten us down.
Others will say that time works in their favor.
The old want to go back to what it was
their nostalgia won't tell them there's no going back.
We are not living. We are struggling not to die.
If we are just, it's because we still fight hatred.

This afternoon there is electricity for the first time in three months.
We listen to state radio by the kitchen window near her balcony
waiting for rice plov to heat on an electric coil.

I ran away to Leningrad alone, after the train took my aunt
one dark night. I fell in love on Nevsky Prospect and married a Moldovan boy and came back here to raise a family with him
under the shade of autumn grape leaves greener than the sun.
Make no mistake, there were years of happiness.
I need not smile to show it. I need only acceptance.

Bessarabia to Estonia, Polsha to Mongolia to Kazakhstan
the reach of empire so often a suicidal national imperative.
Who am I to tell her this? I am young enough to be her son.

We are guilty now of poverty, of idealism
and what the Motherland cannot tell us.
I carry too many ghosts.

Stalin's prompt clean trains took more than her aunt
took father-in-law, sister and both parents.
She owns a curling snapshot of her daughter
tacked to gloomy roses in the carpet that was meant to be her dowry.
It's neither a shrine nor a cross to bear.
After so much loss, it's become merely what's happened.

Before we knew war there were those golden afternoons out of Pushkin
when I washed apples in streams, raced with my girlfriend through fields of sunflowers, hummed songs in the evenings by the well, picked mushrooms in the forest,danced with my husband while soaked purple to the knees in the crush of a grape harvest.

Our plov is ready.
We eat it with cold borsch, red wine and dry dark bread.
We chew in silence. The power goes off again.
Like the sky, the kitchen darkens and grows cold.
We don't know when the power will return.
We know that there is plov left for tomorrow.
Perhaps her husband will find bread on his way home.

I light a candle.
She reads Chekov to me by its light.
I read Shakespeare to her.
There are only beginnings