Vein

We were drifting down the road. I’d picked up
an orange feather and saw the orange bird
at my feet ten or so years ago as I hiked the rim
of the caldera the first spring after the big burn
and was remembering how its orangeness pointed me
to the fir seedlings already sprouting from the char,
but my thoughts were interrupted when a man
in an old blue car pulled alongside and asked
if we’d known Johnny? And yes, of course, we did
remember him. He said Johnny had given him 
his first job down in Klamath Falls forty years ago.
He had some photos he wanted to give to Johnny’s
son, though no one lives in the house anymore
but the wild turkeys who roost on the roof, and
the only sign of Dan is the sign he left behind
for John’s Woods, a subdivision on Elva Lane,
the street named for his mother. I didn’t say I think
cutting up the land you grew up on is like eating
your parents. But as we walked on, I did say to Bill
that Johnny had been dead for twenty years,
and we were both surprised because Johnny was fierce,
and his fierceness lingers though toward the end
he was as sick as our first dog who was dying,
as was Johnny, and for a moment, I mixed her up
with our third dog who I keep expecting to run
toward me on my morning walk, though now he’s
gone, too. I wondered if we’d been good neighbors
to Johnny after Elva died, thinking of the play
we’d driven a long way to see the day before,
the last words spoken before the lights dimmed,
“That’s what we do. We take care of each other,”
and then the audience stood and cheered as if
we’d all been waiting to hear those very words
as the lights went up, and the actors raised their fists
and took their bows. On the drive home, I saw
a lone stanchion standing in the low river
with no longer any bridge to hold, huge piles 
of junked, flattened cars glinting weakly as they
reached skyward, their once-bright colors drained
of possibility in a sky neither high nor blue but filled
with smoke, horizon to horizon, in this summer
of drought and fire, and finally, two guys in overalls
jacking a car onto a trailer, the day for them not close
to over. Guys like them always remind me
of my father, but I wasn’t thinking of him so much
as the bright reds and blues of the hot air balloons 
lifting off the grounds next to the Vets Home 
because it was Napa, home to wine, and how, aloft, 
the tourists drifted above the guys down below 
in the wards, or sometimes out on the lawn looking 
back at them. What a place for my father to end up, 
all those wineries surrounding him, and lately, 
I’ve been dreaming him again. But all I said to Bill was, 
“My father’s been dead twenty years, too–
and your mother twenty-five,” and neither of us
could believe it had been so long. 

ξ

Maxine Scates’ fourth book of poems, My Wilderness, will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press October 12 2021. Her poems have been widely published in such journals as AGNI, The American Poetry Review, Ironwood, Court Green, The New England Review, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Plume, Poetry, and The Virginia Quarterly Review and have received, among other awards, the Starrett Prize, the Oregon Book Award for Poetry, and two Pushcart Prizes.