A Visit With Nicole

We sat in my daughter’s comfortable
home and talked of what made me a
pacifist, my non-combatant military
experience and the lieutenant colonel
in New York who said he would not
make it to bird colonel because he
thought war was a form of political
failure. She listened sweetly.

The drive back to the present home
was colored in diffused memories.
The familiar trip, made hundreds of
times felt liquid and unfamiliar,
steeped in my mortality as if having
traveled back to my roots triggered
new wonder of the old places. There
was question of how to fit in to where

and what has been most of my life.
This wonder is not sadness, nor a
sense of a pending end, but baptism
into my sum. All the dead rode with
me those brief well-known miles, and
time congealed. My mother expressed
confusion about our location, and I
explained she died before I built the house.