Our Own Making

After the Explosion
In those days it often looked as if it had been snowing—
the burnt-tip orchid, chalk plateau
and everything else that found us
after the explosion.
Everything the gentle pallor of ash; every body a white weeping cherry tree
laden with blooms.
In those days we knew the plain in its entirety; and even after,
we stayed
if only for a little while longer.
remember: a child’s small hands on the veranda; the fine, warm powder
the color of dust. below me, in the backyard twilight the garden
tent torn open with heat.
It might have looked like war: a man or a volcano, a series of bombs
or a single burst. The same heat, the toppling, the far-off sirens wailing; held breath waiting
for the aftershock.
Had it been different
in time we might have understood
erosion, or how our bodies could rise out of the sea; could have been
the myth of reinvention, the burning
top of a volcano giving birth to another; or rather the possibility
that everything was temporary.
Instead these days we have grown used to stillness
elsewhere; the softer, colder snows. A woman like we once might have seen
on television could ask us what we have left behind.
We would tell her eagerly
as if we might return
we would begin in the spring, the blooms not yet
fallen; the landscape still intact.
to draw a map: