The December night Mama packs
the moving van with Pat, our neighbor. Warm
enough for hide and seek outside
by porch light, van light, we swarm
to hiding places that only work by night:
inside the shadow that the porch makes,
lying flat on the back yard slide.
The count done. Someone’s found. I run home
as she sets down a box, opens the van door
is dark silhouette against that inner light.
Hittites, Hurians, nomadic pastoralists; the Hyksos
swoop down
in wheeled chariots into Egypt.
Goths, Ostrogoths, Visagoths crowded
by Huns from the Eurasian steppes.
Diaspora.
Children fuss in caravans. The mysterious
sea people repulsed by Egypt
into the Levant
become Philistines.
People moving.
License plates
we count cross-country from the back seat
of a blue Pontiac.
Eager, adolescent
on the dock at night.
Waves slap
the sea wall. The tide’s
receding that pulls me outward
to far ports.
Driven back
from our visit with Dad and our relatives.
Half asleep in the back seat,
I hear Billy telling Dad he’s leaving Mom’s house
to live with him.
I know then.
Me too, I say, know that it will happen
and the future come.
The rutted road - so dry it was that color
of vanilla ice cream, hardened into
the shapes tires made when last they
drove over it moist – was covered
with thousands of tiny frogs, so many legs. They made
me think of newly hatched turtles making
their way to the sea, but we were in
arid Eastern Washington, the lake still
a long drive away. Where could they go? Surely
frogs need water amphibious that green skin.
Was it a mistake? A plague?
Sea birds swoop down after the turtles.
Here there were none. But the frogs,
we all,
still had so far to go.
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