MAP OF SCARS

Here where trees blanch, boulders calve,

I feel the menace: branches spread

like steel spider webs wrapped in clouds.

You appear, sprung from close by, I think,

coiled, not buoyant

but strange to me.

                                   Wind scours

this dying place where no stone,

no fallen leaf or gully rib

urges memory—

wind edges you toward me,

your hand reaches my hand:

murky, you can’t be the man I knew.

Even this time is not my time;

your alien past intrudes.

How did you create this alien past,

your father’s past, his history,

his violent facts,

his certain loss?

Dick, you ghost me to his trail;

your scars map his way to me.

You say his company stole his land,

this land, and chained the cabin door

that weathers white and grainy

like a bone, turns orange

with staining rust from links

and lock whose iron

would crumble now

if petted

by his living hand.

Materialize, Dick.

Vacate this brown, anonymous ditch

down which the summer rains,

given life, would plunge,

fit for drowning

or a final, frantic dance.

Live with me, Dick, both of us

treading history’s hues and heft.

About Keith Moul:

Keith has recently been accepted for publication in The Montucky Review, Decanto, and Imitation Fruit.  Two of his photos were recently accepted by Prick of the Spindle. His chapbook, The Grammar of Mind, was released by Blue & Yellow Dog Press 11/10 and one of his poem/photo combos was a 2010 Pushcart nominee.