Draw back the curtain

I had my alarm set for 3AM so I could see the eclipse, I was in the warm bed thinking and then, suddenly, it was 4AM and I trundled down the hall to my office drew back the curtain and pulled the blind and there it was like a sampled cookie. Jerry had wondered if I was going outside at three to see the moon, but I told him only if it was hiding behind a cloud. The forecast was for clear skies so I was certain one of the West facing windows would let me see the globe and shadow. The beauty was the huge wave of a cloud that was under it, after I’d gazed a bit with my binoculars, the cloud drifted up to cover the glow.

I was looking for a picture of the solar eclipse I had taken in Belgium but I couldn’t find it, perhaps never saved. But then the news of the day drifted in and it sort of didn’t matter anymore.

Here’s a poem from my chapbook, the title poem. Be safe, be kind.

The past is clean

There was only one black man
in our white county, and though
we knew that Selma and Johannesburg
were a universe away (and that we were not
oppressed beyond class and sex) none of us knew
the loneliness or caution of his life.
The notion that one may need to flee
at a given moment.

Our past was clean,
even our parents didn’t know
of the massacres, deep in the canyons.
It took years to clear up
the misunderstanding, that our ancestors
had not waved farewell and good luck
to Chief Joseph or that men from China
had not simply gone missing, and some-
where their gold waited to be found.

I know my uncle disappeared there,
left my cousins and a note; his brothers
sent to find him. I still don’t know
the mystery of that search.
He came back, packed the kids
and faded into Alaska’s coast.

Now my father simmers
in twenty-four years of silence.
No matter, I know now the history,
have hidden his ambiguity
like a third thumb. I have found
that the parallels he sees between
my life and what he imagined is as faulty
as our collected history. Still, like others,
in the barn, I keep a canvas bag that holds
a can of dried beans, some caked-flour,
and a jar of matches, safe from the rain.