Maps. John Freeman

      sun-seared spots on his narrow shoulders.

      He lost an eye. Blew out his left eardrum

      in a packing-plant accident.

      He didn’t make friends, a luxury

      time could not afford, smoked

      through college while doubling

      as an accountant, dedicating nights to numbers,

      pleasure in the orderly arrangement of the known.

      A gift, my father was born at the end of the

      Great Depression to my grandfather’s German wife — unaware of

      the rubble from which he emerged.

      A child among the fragrant groves

      of Sacramento imported to give a desert

      town some shade. Given a ’57 Chevy

      at sixteen, my father rolled it twice

      driving home from football games,

      license never suspended, too easy

      to make such things go away. His father,

      midclimb into the airless summit of his

      unexpected career, did not attend his games.

      The sting of failure learned unobserved.

      Davis, then Berkeley, then seminary,

      where, among closeted homosexuals

      and anguished penitents, my father felt in God

      a familiar sense of bruised neglect.

      He dropped out, worked as a prison

      guard with teenagers put away for

      knife fights and petty thievery,

      one year, peripheral vision and dropstep

      adjusted, never softened.

      I was born in Cleveland, where he moved

      for more school yet sensed the developing sinkhole.

      My mother, cute as a young nurse,

      from an Ohio land-grant family who paid her

      credit-card bills. They lived near Woodland,

      he wore zipper boots, drove a dropped ’69 Mustang.

      It took years to conceive. Their gratitude for children

      was immense.

      A brick thrown at his head from a passing bus

      reminded him that though he felt an outsider,

      the color of his skin appeared white.

      Nights in Long Island and then

      Pennsylvania, his lips on our heads,

      so kind as to be unnoticed. We slept unbroken.

      I don’t remember once having dinner after six.

      Our biggest complaint, the wait before we could

      race out into the humid falling dark to hear

      the pop of the ball against our mitts.

      Thirty years after he left Sacramento, we returned,

      his mother long since dead. The sun poured

      down on our backs at the swim club, sunspots scorched

      onto our broad shoulders. Waking to mists, to tinny clock-radio top-

      forty hits, we sleepwalked to the garage

      in the gloaming, where at five he stood

      counting newspapers sprung from their plastic

      wrappers, my brothers and I pedaling into the fog to

      the squeal and crank of our bicycles.

      Halfway through the route, we’d come upon his car,

      rear gate agape, Bach aerating the silence,

      a lightship docked among the palm fronds

      of an indifferent neighborhood mapped by

      a developer who had long since died. He tosses

      us another forty papers, packed roughly

      and quickly so that we never finished later

      than six.

      Sarajevo (Summer 2016)

      She pointed, two hundred meters: there. I was

      fifteen. We were drinking wine outside

      a bookshop. The shelling lasted

      all night. The ruby-colored sunset, the river

      close. The theater so crowded

      people sat in one another’s laps. Bombs fell so near every

      few minutes, parts of the stage splintered.

      I’m leaning on a car, cool

      metal, smoked glass. The actors,

      she tells me, didn’t flinch, didn’t miss

      a single line. The audience

      didn’t move, didn’t

      make a sound.

      You’re here; you survived;

      and you’re there —

      floor shaking, streets buckle —

      watching a play that

      for eternity will last.

      Swap Meet

      Stingrays black as bats,

      hoods forked open flashing piston heads, Lincolns

      with suicide doors,

      throat-red interiors, steering wheels

      spoked like spiderwebs —

      we admired the catch, cowl induction

      scoops spit-ragged clean, Mustangs with

      cherry-red drive shafts, VWs small and tidy,