Classic Poem

It always comes back like this: light streaming in, the sound of water
in a basin I know is white my mother"s footsteps on the tile floor;
and the long road at day"s end the desert all around us, the sun
red and bearing down, the sun so large the sky seemed smaller,
burdened by its weight. What"s left is souvenir — plastic skeleton
I"d clutched in the market memento mori — and fragment,
memory incomplete, complete as an augur of loss, piecemeal
in its disordered parts: my father was there
and he was not. In his box of photographs
I am sitting on a mule. He watches from the other side
of the camera. There are mountains in the distance behind me.
On the back he has written Tasha: Monterrey, 1969 —
but I recall only the flat road, the desert, the great sun and
light streaming in a window light filtered by water
closing over my head. How long before someone, my father,
pulled me out? Memory is the sun"s dazzle
on the pool"s surface above me, is the primal sound
from my mother"s throat as I sink, words I can"t make out,
her quick footsteps on the tiles. Always, she is fragment —
augur of loss. I see her reaching, arms outstretched,
her voice muffled and far away her body between me
and the high sun, a corona of light around her face — her face blurred
(then, now) as through water: this distant, wavering lens.