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I imagine them lounging
in the late October sun, languid
on a warm afternoon,
with Donner himself,
hat pulled over his eyes,
asleep in the grass,
and Mrs. Reed seated on a boulder
beside him, mending the rip
in her daughter’s blouse;
I picture the Breen children
wading at the edge of the Truckee,
and the guides dozing
beneath the whirr of cicadas invisible
in the Ponderosas behind them,
all of them satisfied and rested,
perhaps, for the first time in months,
confident in the slant of light,
now that Stanton
has returned with supplies,
that the push to the summit will be done,
that the following days will lead
down to the San Joaquin;
and I think of them
in that moment convinced,
after stopping five days,
that despite death and delusion
and one mistake after another
after another, that somehow
salvation still remained possible,
and success so close,
a certainty under a clear, predictable
autumn sky.
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for my father
The day you died was
a beautiful day:
by noon the sky had cleared to a calm, deep blue;
a breeze like warm breath lifted off the bay
and moved over the campus where a few
of my students sat laughing together,
on the lawn in front of class—grateful, no doubt,
for the sudden arrival of beach weather
and the few extra minutes to hang out
before I prepped them on their final exam.
That day I brought a cell phone into class,
recognizing, if nothing else, I am
your son, and if the call came in at last,
you’d prefer I do what I’d been paid to do.
I finished their prep, said nothing of you.
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