NOT MEMORIES by Robert King

What does he think, my father,
looking out his new tame window,
his life gently narrowed to a room

along a hall of rooms? Not memories.
“The things you remember,” shaking
his head,  as if I’d invented my youth

but he couldn’t say for sure.
I’ve stopped asking for pieces
of information to straighten out

some little part of family history,
and have become his accomplice
as we sit and look out his window

past the bird-feeder without seed
to some general town. When I leave
I remind myself again to bring

bird-seed to fill something up here
although I’ll forget as he forgets
to notice the absences around us.

Two Poems by Robert King

AT THE END OF THE ICE-AGE IN WYOMING

Mid-morning, a woman in a yellow blouse
and shorts stands on the wooden deck

of her double-wide, hands up
behind her hair, head lifted

to the sun and the clouds, drinking in
the blue spaces of the morning,

unaware of the Interstate
down which I quickly disappear

from her secret glorious life.

______________________

A COMPLETE HISTORY OF AMERICA IN 85 WORDS

(from a plaque near the Tampa Convention Center)

Near this spot–on the shore of the bay–
stood a large Timuquan Temple Mound.

Before Christ. One city-block long, fifty feet high:
temples and residences of chiefs and shamans.

Ft. Brooke soldiers in the 1840’s used
a tall Gumbo Limbo tree here as a lookout.

Ladies of the post enjoyed ice-cream parties
at the summit in a beautiful Chinese pavilion.

After the Army withdrew in 1882, the mound
was razed to fill the Jackson Street ditch

which extended from Marion Street
to the Hillsborough river.