Six Quarts

Six Quarts-
For Ellyn
-But how much inherited?
Stray clouds have caught themselves
On the tops of trees like tufts of wool:
We were driving to the Mountain together, the one
Whose shadow we grew up in, the one
Our City was named for before
It was renamed for a man
Who never once set eyes there.

Six Quarts, but how much did they give me?
The same that drove my family
Across dark oceans through forested foreignness,
Why they never really stopped
Until they reached the second coast. And from here?
My back is against the shore now, there’s nowhere left to go.

Meanwhile, you walk backwards, retracing your steps
To reclaim something that’s been lost.
We write the kind of letters that will someday
be kept in a trunk under your bed,
Embalmed in perfume:
Time has already hardened around me like tree rings,
Piling into river banks.

The day I gave my poems the names
Of the children I would never have,
I drove out to the coast
And scattered ashes to the winds:
My line ends here; those letters under your bed
will be divided and sold as some mystery.

But on that day, under the mountain that lost its name,
Stray clouds were caught on the tallest branches like lost thoughts.
Tightly wrapped in our synthetic cocoons, we slept
And dreamt of trees.