There's No History Here (Poem)

There’s No History Here

This country has no history,
they say.

Then what’s that breathing there?

There are no stories told
more than a generation old.

Musty papers in old libraries,
read by odd fellows who believe they can rebuild the past.
Frail quilts stored on high dusty shelves,
brought out into bright air
and fingered by old women,
as they tell who pieced the patchwork,
ran the needle through the batt,
made arcs and whorls that held
the coverlet together; these tales made up
of memories, misremembered names
and half remembered facts
don’t make a history.

Nor do those fragments
of a myth the elders tell.

Oral history’s not history,
they say.
Each teller adds his notions
of what was truly done.
Each teller makes a tale
of what she knows must,
not might, have been.

And if these tales are true enough
(for truth in history’s a guess,
a fiction built on facts),
if then these tales are true as any history may be,
that doesn’t signify –
a generation or two back’s as far as memory
and memory of memories reach.

The land seems empty,
the sound of the truck
working up the hill remote and muted
by the space enfolding it.
The ghosts of those who came before us
don’t speak in the wind,
their language doesn’t
echo in the water filled canyons,
their songs have long since faded
into silent distances.

And yet –
        and yet.

Something moves behind me,
touches my neck,
something like a word,
half heard,
catches my ears.

I stop and listen.

The heat seems loud as a shout,
the pines’ sweetness hangs
in the sun-stilled air –

There is history here.

There was history here.

What’s left of it –
a few flakes struck from stone
the rusty stain of blood
bleached
by indifferent rain and sun.

Copyright 2012 W Kirchmeir