Jane Shlensky's "Fly Me" after Owen-Murakami and Van Ameyden

FLY ME
by Jane Shlensky
after Kites by Ginger Owen-Murakami 

and Vicki Van Ameyden

No one—not even she—remembered
her in that dress, too white and delicate
for people who work in soil, too prissy
for a boyish girl who liked rough games
and climbing to sky branches of Old Oak.
But here she is, the one picture of her 
in white lace and patent leather pumps,
stored away in a trunk, the yellowing dress
wrapped in tissue paper below it.

“Do we really remember such early events
or do we only think so because of pictures of them?”
she asks, looking into each of our faces. 
That spurs us to reminisce of Old Mack, 
the horse pictured with us astride him bareback, 
of Dan and Jeanie, the collies who half-raised us, 
of stern-faced aunts and red-faced tippling uncles, 
of a family band playing after cookouts,
those same brothers singing harmony, 
of catching fireflies and tadpoles 
with running hordes of cousins, 
each memory raising up others like smoke,
faces long harbored, experiences long edited,
floating images that exist nowhere 
but in the albums in our heads.

All that laughter at recovering
what can never really be gone, 
part and parcel of us, finding 
and embracing our Selves of long ago, 
fills us with longing and joy,
for here we are, growing old far apart,
but still tethered by some ghostly cord
that holds us fast as family, 
each fluttering on whatever wind that shaped us,
each flying in this willing quadrant of sky.