Their names
in tatters,
old cardboard,
in the dim
school hall.

Is it a dream?
My old jacket
sleeping by green
cinder blocks,
posed by the
locked boiler
room door?

It is a dream.
The snow has voted
flake by flake
and I must leave,
sweeping my tracks
with an elm branch
as I go.

I do not belong there,
in the past, where the
apricots are always ripe,
where the hopscotch trees
frame the laughter of
their young faces
in amber.

I'll visit them
like a deep sea diver,
in the silence
of pure oxygen,
turning over the sea floor
to find their names
in tatters,
old cardboard.