Mid April Poem

History of a Lost Primeval Fantasy

Whither or Wither Away

By ordinary reckoning, it was not so long ago,

and I still measure history by experience.

The generations are always getting shorter

the way an old man’s height shrinks. From whence

we may deduce, as those old ages said,

that between my father and his father and so

on back in time it is not so long. The door

when opened lets in a breath of air once breathed

by Napoleon or Charlemagne, like the worms

creeping in and out of Polonius and Caesar,

and just as one young Pharaoh forgot the promises

his father made, the first historian had premises

we can no longer believe in. And what we tell

our children, they will confuse when their own sons

and daughters ask for explanations. “Bizarre,”

they will say, “quite impossible and please don’t lie

to us. No one ever walked on the moon.

There were never times without the internet.

The oceans cannot freeze and people walk

from Siberia to Alaska. Besides, last year

you sang  us other songs mellow-voiced crooners

crooned, and said that men and women danced

together, and you listened to the radio

under the blankets late at night.” My mother

waited impatiently for the war to end. Her brother

disappeared in Hawai’i that December day.

I was bitten by a chicken on the West Coast

and heard the battles fought across the Pacific

though I was not yet four.  Later, on Iwo Jima,

the GIs saw the pictures I drew with crayons and glued

on the window for the passers-by to make
a V-for-Victory sign and smile at me.

On the day of Hiroshima I had my tonsils out.

By ordinary reckoning, this was not so very long ago.

My grandfather’s grandfather saw the Emperor

ride past through his shtetl in Poland bedraggled

while the snow was falling. I date every great event

by what I know or want to believe. The children

whispered that bubble gum would be back soon

and if I had a penny to put in the glass bowl

I could get some to chew.  This was impossible,

I thought, and so too the strange man by the train

two years later my mother said was my dad.

Many things cannot be true, even though they happened.

I cannot be as old as I am and everyone else disappeared.