Basement Photographs

In the cellar

you      and I your older brother

construct another project

the trains of childhood

replaced with a model race car track

built by us from wood and foil

in the picture you and I

heads bowed in concentration

don’t seem to feel the need to talk

but as we planned

the roadway slope

and the spacing of the track

we must have talked

and though I never was a dreamer

we must have talked of dreams

the photographs

are black and white

like shadows     like my memories

and I have spent a lifetime

searching them

for fragments of your voice

©2015 Frank Kearns

My Father’s House

My Father’s House

The house of my memory

is a semi-rural farm house

with musty smells of

old wall paper and indoor plants.

You              retired

sitting at the dining room table

in pajamas and bathrobe

cigarettes and coffee

AM talk radio

KFWB Boston

daily pleasure

at the agonies of the traffic report.

The house of my dream

is a different house

on a narrow fishing-town street

before great grandmother’s knick-knacks became

a part of frozen memory.

You are a boy

entering the magic door

winding up the attic staircase

the wood a lighter brown with hints of red

the steps twisting and so narrow.

The photograph is yellowed.

You are so delicate in your uniform

your China Burma India Theater patch

jumping out from small shoulders.

Your eyes are feeling something,

seeing something beyond you and me.

In the attic

rubber band model planes

delicate balsa stringers

with tissue paper skin

light as the still air.

And a homemade short wave radio set.

You hear the news

open that high peak window

lean out

and shout to the neighborhood

Pearl Harbor has been attacked!

Ghost Stories

The close sun of Los Angeles

is hard on ghosts

you won’t find them as you might

lurking deep in redwood forests

or soaring on the wind

in the high sky of Mojave

In the light we tell our stories

cheerfully with bits of lunch

           at noisy restaurant tables

standing in chance market meetings

or bravely in fluorescent

          story-telling classes

The ghosts prefer to hide and wait for dark

to float down moon-lit river channels

tiptoe among the black palm tree silhouettes

echo back the words they hear

          in corners of dim living rooms

collect the things that we have hidden deep

and then explode us from our deepest sleep

© 2015 Frank Kearns