Time unseen time our continuing fiction
however we tell it eludes our dear hope and our reason

that is a pure condition of the story
and wherever our parents came from is another century

and age which they themselves could barely remember
but carried with them as their own year after year

hidden away hardly looked at until the secret
without their noticing had faded all the details white

for my mother it came to be the lace veil covering
the front of the baby carriage where she was being

wheeled through the Garden of the Gods when her parents
   were 
still alive as she told about it later

and for my father it was the glare bleaching the surface
of the river as he sat under the white blaze

of summer in the rowboat tied above the waterline
where he was allowed to hold the oars and imagine

leaving did he see any farther when he was
dying in summer after midnight and before the solstice

coughing saying he was not afraid and was the veil there
when my mother turned from her own garden one evening
    that same year

telling a friend on the telephone that she was going
to gets some rest now and her glasses were lying

apart from her on the floor not more than an hour
later when a neighbor pushed the door open and found her