Fine Lines

Sometimes

(Josh Bieber is a student at the University of Nebraska at Omaha .)

Mom and Pop would gently buckle me
Into the back seat of our Datsun
(That’s a Nissan with a smaller engine and more rust),
and Dad would drive us forty days and forty nights,
Eleven hours, all the way to Iowa.

We went often,
but this trip was different
Jeff, my favorite uncle who also happened to be Mom’s brother
Also happened to have died.
A Great Plains thunderstorm
traveled with us, in between.
Hailstones fell, and rain, and somewhere
along the way it was explained
to me that, “No, honey, Jeff can’t talk.
No, Jeff’s not asleep.”

Somewhere,
in the middle of Nebraska ,
we passed the storm,
and I began to have some idea.
Later, at the funeral home,
I started to cry
Wondering why my
Uncle had been brought
to this strange house of sadness,
stinking of medicine and tears.

Mom and Pop stood and made
no sound, mourning Jeff
But I couldn’t find him there
in that cold room.

We shall, once, stand
upon this cusp of youth,
a decade or more behind us,
and the whole world just above
our line of sight.

We leave our playthings
in the sand at dusk;
For tomorrow, we believe,
but a day will dawn
when we will leave them unclaimed,
dingy reminders of what it
really means to be a child.

We have words, now;
always in retrospect, it seems.
Innocence and vitality and joy
What were the words we used then?
When all we knew of love was pure,
And all we knew of pain were our scabby, dirty knees
and all we knew of hatred was
our fleeting, pretty anger at a spanking or an early bedtime.

What were those words?
How can we define our singular vision?
Unobstructed by what we have
become in these watery days?
How can we describe
The life that hides inside
our aging flesh
As we wander through the world.

We have forgotten how to trust.