A Story, or Just the Past

By Marko Capoferri

from a Greyhound near Kearney, Nebraska

My face facsimiled in the bus window is my father’s face,
because I’m pressed into the kind of dark that makes space
a crossable thing. How my nose slopes and my brow
withholds, how lines add up to a lifetime’s worth of turning
away. I see this because outside it’s hard to see much,
but I know whatever’s out there goes on forever sounding
a long, hollowed-out vowel, say, the mouth of the ‘O’ in Open
and its aftertaste, its overtone.

                                     Bloodlines are just like this:
topographies expressed abstract and instinctive the way ivy
vines red brick, sketched for me before I had a chance. But
if I did I’d still be out here turning over stones and state lines
to gauge the ambiguous distances between men. And the silences?
Let me spin a wreath of dead leaves, place it on an effigy’s neck
and the flames can do the talking for us, give the night its name,
its loose credos, pennies dropped in a shallow pool.

            The land
at such an hour looks almost free of acrimony, a kindness
without consolation; what might be a house five miles away,
where good news glows, might be a house on fire.

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Marko Capoferri is a poet, musician, and former conservation worker. He has lived and worked in eight US states, including Montana, where he has lived since 2015. He received an MFA in poetry from the University of Montana in Missoula. His work has appeared in The Shore, Painted Bride Quarterly, Porter House Review, and elsewhere.