I watch you now as I look backward through
the decades that flicker like shuffled frames.
Your brothers are all at war, gone in the battleships
that glide past empty atolls.

Your sisters vanish on the backs of motorcycles
or fade into the lives of grocery clerks
with Coke bottle glasses.
Your father stares into the abyss of his fedora.

At dusk the black shades are drawn in the bungalows.
You race your collie Rex on shorebird legs
flush from wind from the desert valleys,
watch charcoal birds thicken the slack phone lines.

But this season, like last, the rain holds back.
In the bodiless hour before dawn you’ll hear
oranges drop in the abandoned orchard
and dream they disappear into the parchment earth.

---

Dennis Cummings lives in San Diego County where he worked for 45 years in the flower growing and shipping industry.  He has published poems in Dunes Review, Barnstorm Journal, Baltimore Review, Watershed Review and Streetlight Magazine, among others.  He studied creative writing at San Diego State in the early seventies.