Return to Seattle: Bastille Day

No difference in the gray gulls, sobbing
like women who circled the tumbrels,
scaffold silhouettes of fir.
The same sky lowers over the channel,

the plane follows it down
like an obsession, guillotine blade
of sun on water. All of this
for what? Walking the green neighborhoods

with names like gracious women: Madrona,
Magnolia. Rain telling its stories
on the ponds, rainbows fracturing
in oil slicks. How could I go back

to where I first took my age
between my hands like a lover's face
and said, "This far, no farther"?
Then moved from one coastline

to the next, as if I had
no winter and no home? For years
it was easy-nothing to answer
for what went beyond the weather,

too soon to give up on the body
or lose myself in the blue
selectivity of dream.
Now, what stands berween me

and the long frontier with winter
A father, sleepwalking among ohms
and voltmeters, the electric smell
of metal. A brother, face-down

in the soft gray light
of the calculus. A sister,
vanished from the glass house
of her thoughts before anyone

could have grown into her name.
My mother, 1945, stepping from
the Armistice Day prop plane
with her unchanged face,

light off the Cascade rain front
troubling her memory with its danger,
years before she could blame
herself for everything.