Tuning

It was a life of exile under the trees. My father came to the stockyards. My mother from a farm. In 1952 or 2 my parents flew from Kansas City to Indianapolis to look for a house when my father was transferred. I think of them far above me small as birds when they flew, and the earth to them was a sandbox in our backyard where I made roads to a house I never found. I often think of wives in tract houses. The cows and pigs my father yarded before they walked up the ramp to the kill. Sometimes I thought we were together because of something terrible we had done. My father's Cherokee heritage tucked under some sort of shame. The past _______ What was it? I call to them above me no larger than a leaf.