Unrolling the spool towards its end, the mind
Kept getting snagged on a more recent
Memory that ate at the value of the past.
Daughter on basalt at Craters of the Moon,
Teal t-shirt and blue jeans, the sky blue-grey
With wildfire ash, gold rabbitbrush blooms
Carpeting the black rocks, high as her arms,
So that her round blonde head bobbed
A balloon above almost-matching flowers.
Below her the panorama of broken lava
Sprawled to horizon, peculiarly grim beauty.
I had hobbled out on the trail behind her
And forgot to bring my phone. No photos.
Well oh well. Photos distort everything.
Thirty years earlier, I had bummed around
Europe for a summer on a Eurail Pass,
A youth hostel card, and five hundred
Dollars in travelers' cheques. No watch,
No phone of any kind of course, no camera.
I brought back only one snapshot someone
Had taken of me in sunflowers in Germany,
But I dined out on the anecdotes for years,
And several small visuals from the sojourn,
Of a goat on an overnight train in Spain,
Of the fine red-gold hairs on a girl's arm
On a railing in the sun, of the moment
I turned a corner and came face to face
With Goya's Saturn at the Prado, survived,
Memories hallucinatorily rich and unpinned
By the scraps of pictures that tie us down.
So I thought to console myself about my lack
Of snaps of daughter in the black and bloom
Of that recent afternoon, contented myself
With describing the day to her grandparents
Down in Salt Lake. But I went to bed worse
For the telling, for the realization none of us
Had thirty years left to savor the description.
A photograph might have been treasured
By daughter, by generations after, the way
I had pored over the few daguerreotypes
Of my mid-nineteenth century ancestors.
But what good was my memory now?
It amounted to storing papers in a fire.
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