Jeff Daniel Marion

Last night in a dream you came to me. We were young again and you were smiling, happy in the way a sparrow in spring hops from branch to branch. I took you in my arms and swung you about, so carefree was my youth. What can I say? That time wears away, draws its lines on every feature? That we wake to dark skies whose only answer is rain, cold as the years that stretch behind us, blurring this window far from you.

She stands by the riverbank, notes from her bagpipes lapping across to us as we wait for the traffic light to change. She does not know we hear— she is playing to the river, a song for the water, the flow of an unknown melody to the rocky bluffs beyond, for the mist that was this morning, shroud of past lives: fishermen and riverboat gamblers, tugboat captains and log raftsmen, pioneer and native slipping through the eddies of time. She plays for them all, both dirge and surging hymn, for what has passed and is passing as we slip into the currents of traffic, the changed light bearing us away.

In the back of the junkhouse stacked on a cardtable covered by a ragged bedspread, they rest, black platters whose music once crackled, hissed with a static like shuffling feet, fox trot or two-step, the slow dance of the needle riding its merry-go-round, my mother’s head nestled on my father’s shoulder as they turned, lost in the sway of sounds, summer nights and faraway places, the syncopation of time waltzing them to a world they never dreamed, dance of then to the dust of now.