I lean back in chair
Have realized, body
Now frail, I’m only
67-years less hair on skull,
What remains of thought,
Simple jottings of simple man
Lingering outside Plato’s
Cave, then back to retrieve
Sun glasses, I then wander
Through gray smoke, tree
Lined river bank, where
Is my camera? In my hand
Simple tablet, wondering
Light box on digits
Sun bleeding light down
Among plague coming
Shining artifact what leaves
Earth, beaches, forest, mountain
Civilized are those of us wonder
Leading our children by hand,
Much in our generations left
Behind when we wonder ethnic
To the bone; Rambled out
Of cave, to forest, children
Aware, she’s thirty
This year she’s thirty
What will she deal with, smoke
Will never part, I sit
Quietly, all my time
With her mother since 9-11
Day of my birth I was so young,
Twenty-seven, Together on January 7,
1980 we stepped
Into light, arriving where, no
Beatings she’s 64, I’m 67, Oh God

How did we travel from Iowa.
Yes, To Nebraska, Yes To Colorado
To Illinois, To rest in South Dakota
USA, What happened as in 1993
Stunned out of full-time teaching
Failing tenure, gave way
Over many, 26 years, 11 years
Wandering USA plains in light
Truth finding scrawled images.
Nowhere lost, color negatives,
No evidence of Kodak
In Walmart, in Eastman,
More in electronic when Nikon
We lived in South Dakota. Nikon
Made no more film cameras, all
Dried up, no darkrooms, computers
Became laboratory, Where is acid
Bath, Hydrous, what water soak
Rivers of silver, silver dumped
Into town in North Dakota.
Why did we come to South Dakota
We only know, it was a good
Place to avoid daily murder, drug
Bust, would never be the same
Again, throwing shadows back
Into the cave, no longer helpless,
We leave a little behind our shadows.