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Foraging
by Earl Coleman

Desperate among the attic's dusty dresses
and foxed leaves
I wormed my grimy fingers
through letters of no credit,
codicilled documents of trust,
all signatured with dummy corporation names
in bold calligraphy,
grabbling for none of these
but for some deathless me
treasured up as I existed in that tenuous once
when frozen silent in a strobe of sunlight
I had pulsed alive and smiled,
my twelve-year parents grimly looking gay.

The sun up here sieves through the rain-specked window
but lights no corners that I have not strewn
with perfect crystals of dead time
as I paw the jettisoned cargo of my years
empty as the creaking house below
the barren chambers yawning parentless and dry,
the flowered paper wilted, current cut,
those pictures disappeared that would have fixed me as I was.

Yet I, survivor, turn from dust,
fathering and mothering myself,
cleansed even of the fallout ash
from funerary jars,
my rearview glassless and my days uncaptive,
although held forever in yellowing uncertainty
in the album inventory of my past,
my self the record and the urn
the appled knowledge of my days.