A Day in the Great House

              People who believe in physics know that
             the distinction between past, present and
           future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
                                          
                                                                  -EINSTEIN

from Field Stones
by Robert Kinsley

In the sudden
flash
that was before
nothing
else was
 light
riddles
into the day
that is
part of
an instant of
this, the day
in the green house.

* * *

In the tropical background
400 million years ago,
whisk ferns
sway in the wind
and rain are brushed back
by life climbing out of water, breathing
the fire of air, trading gill
for lung.
Crushed under our bodies
taking form, the fern
as delicate as the future
is pressed deep into earth
and will fossilize and remain.

* * *

Every Saturday night
when my mother was young
The Pappy Howard show rode
the air waves out of
Cleveland, like a breeze
on Lake Erie.
For one hundred and twenty
miles in any direction
all Jerry Lee, Hank Williams,
Patsy Cline, Cowboy Copus.
My mother president of the Pappy
Howard Fan Club, always
had a seat, her picture
with all the stars. 
Sometimes
an arm draped over a shoulder
as if old friends are meeting again
after a long absence, and it is
absence she can't now quite
believe.  Pappy long lost to
cancer, Patsy dropped out of
the sky, Hank dead in the back
of a car how many years to Akron? 
The fan club soft as
limestone dissolved
like water on
the tongue.

* * *

In a German cathedral
voices in the choir
rise and fall, rise
and fall like leaves
in wind.  Now my
great and distant
grandmother
is solo, her
voice like an
angel, her voice
like God and in
the pews men are
weeping for themselves
for their children,
boarding ships, scattering
like sporangia on the
undersurface, on the margin
of America.

* * *

When morning light pronounces
June, warm with the smell of flowers
and my son, who is warm in his bed,
rises and comes to greet us
with hugs, the small talk of his body
meeting the sleepiness
of ours, we are whisk ferns
born for the wind and air.

* * *

Along the Snake
River, 1854,
my great grandfather
listens in the wind
to the sweet notes
all around him
repeated.  He has crossed
this country leading his
team and knows vision
as symmetry, a translation
of plane.  And ends where
he began, in Ohio.  Oh his
deathbed, the voices of children...

* * *

We are what's repeated,
the sad refrain of a country
song humming out over
the water, rising like radio
waves spiraling I've read
somewhere outward always.
Saturday night and Pappy's
still singing, his
voice shinning
forever, bright
as a star.

* * *

My grandmother is
alone, solo on her
stage of seven
children, her husband
dead, another stone in
the quarry.  On the
clothes line the arm
of his flannel shirt flaps
in the breeze, is soft
as fern against her
cheek.  Over in the
quarry men continue
blasting, limestone
and fossils, the
beautiful synclinal folds.

* * *

If I could clear the air
it would always be summer,
my mother kneeling among the
flowers, her flowers rising
like the flash of wings
bright with the color of names:
Azalea, Dogwood, Hysenthia
Bouganvillea, Delphinium,
that drift up and down
bordering the road where drivers
pull over to gather the view
always in July, the sweet aromatic
air my mother is.

* * *

Here is the flash of sun, Ohio
bordered by water, two sides
in perfect symmetry,
this kingdom of
childhood, of
fathers and mothers
of  all the ones before and
after, where this all started
years ago in fog and mist
in the small trickling of water...