Todd Outcalt is the
author of thirty books in six languages, including Common Ground,
Candles in the Dark, The Best Things in Life Are Free and Where in the
World We Meet (his first poetry collection). His most recent poetry has
been published in The Oklahoma Review, Rattle, Poetry Quarterly, and
elsewhere. He lives in Brownsburg, Indiana and enjoys kayaking, hiking
and travel.
Class Photos
Some refuse to return from the dead
While others flame as unrequited love
Not all the teachers remembered by name
The one girl tanned in summer dress instead
Of bell-bottom jeans is now dreaming of
Retirement and cashing in her 401-K
The captain of the football team
Is bald and fat and imperially gray
As are his legions cutting down their nets
And the loose girl every boy’s dream
Is a four-time grandma on her way
To condo in Florida before she forgets
How young we were and promising
In those simple years of dance
When all our dreams were high as air
Implied as we stood our smiling rows to sing
In ignorance of some high romance
And the Kodachrome which kept us there
Antiques
If one stares deeply enough into the centuries
The ghosts return to dine at table
Or sit in wicker rocking chairs to sew
Even the portraits gaze back in realities
Rich with mink or black sable
Dead long before their smiles could grow
The tiny tins and brittle toys
No longer hold their promise rusted out
The clocks unwound no longer chime
But we see in those photos the girls and boys
We used to know though we will doubt
Ours will fade like them or run out of time
A Tree the Memory of a Tree
They grew tall once as oak and sycamore
The pines egregious as any sin
None so old as the redwoods before
The Spanish arrived in a legion
Of pox to fell the cathedrals of ash
Only the eldest eyes could see
Through smoke and mirror to glimpse the stars
Their silver portents a mystery
Comforting the lost tribes dim powers
Exchanged for beads and promises
Some would know centuries before
That the forests would disappear
From the foundations of the earth’s floor
Vacant as the sky that binds us here
Passenger
Pigeons
Once their numbers eclipsed the sun
When they flew by
millions from field to field
The light gone out of
them sported and killed
Great swarms of them falling to earth by the ton
How their blue feathers made a meal for hogs
Or could anyone seen
their oblivion on the horizon
Blown bright pink at
the barrel of a gun
Their extinction as easy as falling off logs
The last one at the Cincinnati Zoo
Martha
was a spectacle of death
Betraying her
millions in her final breath
Her fame higher than any bird ever flew
A century later not even her distant squab
Could die in numbers large enough to be macabre
~Todd Outcalt
