Stunned by time, we walk
into the pale room blinking,
as in a dream, and find
ourselves transported
to 1965.
Who are these strangers?
Where is my locker?
What time is the game?
Blue and gold balloons
sway gently; some of us
use canes. The room is
spinning slowly, like an old
Ronettes 45:
“Be my…be my baby.”
Everyone looks faintly
familiar, as if, perhaps,
they might have been friends.
Forty-four of us have passed
on, but we still know them
as kids: the fullback,
the cheerleader, the
quiet girl, faces smiling
on the memorial wall.
In eight years the rest
of us will reach the average
lifespan for our birth year.
Eight more chill, clear
Octobers. If we make it
to average.
I still have dreams
about wandering the halls,
lost in the shuffling crowd,
looking for my history
class, but the room
numbers are always out of order.
I wake in a sweat.
We try to recognize each
other, stealing glimpses of
name tags with yearbook
photos. But we have turned into
different people, bags under
our eyes, carrying some weight.
Entranced, we walk the halls;
slip through passages, past
the lockers with their secrets;
our footsteps rebound.
Some people shout
incoherently. We may all be
hallucinating, or at least, disarmed.
That day in November when they
killed the president; we wound
our way home in slow motion;
the boys tried not to cry.
Then came the wars, the blood,
the draft board,
more assassinations,
the shootings, the losses.
We got married, had children,
or not. We went on;
we grew old.
Some of us survived
to walk the beach
at Avalon, see children grow,
or watch the leaves
turn against an October sky
of shocking blue.
Inside the chrysalis, we
grew wings, opened
up, found something
hidden, almost learned
to speak in sentences
about something
besides ourselves.
Some of us can’t seem to
shut up, spraying machine
gun bursts of words
randomly across
round tables. We don’t mind.
You don’t need
To justify your life to us. We were
here then, long ago, together,
in this small cocoon,
and we went out into
the world: Saigon, Geneva,
Palo Alto, or just down the road to Darby,
class rooms, diners,
board rooms, factories,
churches, and, somehow,
we grew up.
We stumbled, we loved; maybe
we learned to hear
the tanager’s song
or to unfold
the coiled scraps of being
in our tattered brains into a soul
that can listen, that
won’t pretend, that can
sit under the dogwoods in late
afternoon and see
the sun slip behind the clouds,
that can know we are home.