MIA

By Celeste Schantz

MIA


I think of him
when I pass what remains of the lot
that used to be the A & P.
He is there in cloud cool April
his shirt crisp, checked,
pushing slow metallic centipedes
of carts in staccato clacks.
Still, sometimes if I listen closely
he whispers to me from the ivy shadows
of the court house,
and sometimes passing
the doors of the old Orpheum
or when I revisit Main Street,
a whisper rises from the sun-seared grass
to his house, shuttered, boarded up,
silent as a sphinx.
I see him peer out
from the eyes of this stone boy
in a fountain spilling dark water;
he regards the faces of strangers at the diner,
bowed behind their late noon glass.
Not one of them, not one
remembers his sculpted lips, the curls,
the thin, birdlike shoulders of a child.
Those that knew him moved away,
we move away
and like young children bicycling past,
the years wheel out of reach,
then everything new moves in.
I try not to forget him
but I do. I do. I will.
Groom of dying light, Father of loss
it must be this; sometimes a child ends up
as sun on sidewalk stones, faded and low,
dappled in evergreens. Who knows—
he might have one day married someone here.

See how these little girls skip across
his shadow, never knowing.		
















 

Photograph is of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial of Greater Rochester, New York, which commemorates the 280 Rochester natives who perished in Vietnam. It also represents American military personnel who succumbed to illnesses linked to the Army’s use of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War.