Richard Luftig
From Memory
Here in California
I’m reduced to thumbing
through old notebooks
for poem ideas or from cut-out
newspaper stories about small-town
doctors retiring after fifty years
and tractor parades on the Fourth of July.
I try but have probably forgotten
how to tell folks about barns
built in the old German style,
of graveled county roads
with weed-flowers growing wild
in the culverts designed
to help drain the fields.
I’m struggling to recall
all of those things
about Amana and Kadoka,
Fisher and Broken Bow,
that made them special,
now reduced to dots on maps
of states, where railroads
once ran out of towns,
towns ran out of enough kids
to man the high-school
football team on Friday nights.
These places where crops
and factories failed,
where work and dreams
moved to warmer climes.
Even before all that, I’m trying
to remember growing up,
riding the subway
to the last stop in Brooklyn—
Far Rockaway-- to explore
the boardwalk and ride
roller coasters at Coney Island
or strolling around what passes
for a lake in Central Park,
watching lovers in rowboats
share a kiss. And today,
I rummage through our garage
and look through a buried book
of snapshots, mostly of the kids,
some of us, taken back when
cameras held film and folks
took the spent rolls to Woolworths
to be developed. We’d pick them up
the next week, take them out
of the envelope right there
in the store, shuffle through
the pile one-by-one. And this one,
of us walking hand-in hand
along a creek somewhere in Pennsylvania,
or so it says from the writing on the back,
and I now remembering how back then
we believed the world would always
be ours for the planning,
never how, in this lifetime,
we would have to make it
all up as we went along.
