The fever breaks; the basket rabbit finds the door

And my eyes clear for the first time since 1967,

The year Santa Claus lay bleeding in a rice field,

Beard blowing in a chopper blade breeze;

Earshot pa-rum-pa-pum-pum’s fading

Like a trigger crease on a curled finger.

The year Salvation Army bells

Did not retreat until her water broke

With a stumble across hospital tiles

Into a caught balance and glimpse

From squinted nursery eyes,

Red-faced and over-lit,

Cold as any war can be.

But now my eyes focus on the photograph:

1947; the boxcars were empty;

The ground grew nothing from the bones planted 

There. We danced around an invisible flame

Of ghosts and desert sand, searched the skies

For disks and God.

All we found was a radio tower,

Two red lights, blinking out of time,

Save a synchronous moment;

Their cycles aligned, indifferent.

Out of the steel tip, the news broke;

Transmissions unfolded across generations:

A thousand flags and clouds enflamed,

Gun turret silos and whisper missiles;

Pandemic carousel of hands

Held, buildings crumbled;

Short summers and long nights;

Final sighs and first breaths

Staggered by smoke and graphite flashes.

Transformers down, the theatre lights go up and

Hollow eyes, on their way to cars heavy with fear,

Focus across a full-color train yard.  They never

See their black and white newsreel shadows,

But only smell a brown green September,

The night a branch broke beneath a

Fatigue cuffed hand, fallen and alone,

Except for a photograph caught

In a chopper blade breeze.