1. Jan. 29, 2003

Is it a small boy out there
in the mist? Is he cold, does he
have his coat on? Is it buttoned up?
I know that he is waiting out there
in the mist.
　　　　　   But I am driving through
today’s business, my cell phone on, pinging with alerts…
Is the mist folding closed behind me?
Hurry here, hurry there.

Or is it a line
Of hunting coyotes calling to me out there?
Knowing me,
here in the loud car,
out there,
knowing my desire and my emptiness:
still, camouflaged, waiting
　　　　　     for me to stop and get out.

2. Feb. 1, 2003

I pick up my small son and teenaged daughter at the Astronomy Club, stamping off snow at the door and going through to the stoop in the back where the telescopes are usually set up, but not tonight. Everyone is in the living room sitting in pulled up chairs or on the rug making commemorative drawings for the lost astronauts, Commander Rick Husband, Pilot William “Willie” McCool, Mission Specialist the Indian Kalpana Chawla, Mission Specialist Laurel Clark, Mission Specialist Michael Anderson, Mission Specialist David Brown, and Mission Specialist the Israeli Ilan Ramon. Men and women, multicultural role models for my children, with all our generative ties from the Punjab to the Ukraine, from Tanzania to England, from London and Vancouver and Winnipeg, and from their grandparent’s homes in Edmonton and Calgary, and at last their young years in Lethbridge, Alberta. The children are somber and come to terms in their own way with the departed heroes, the adults’ stories of the foam that fell, the speculations on the disintegration of the ship on re-entry, those last transmissions—tire pressure readings—the burning plumes and the debris field across half of Texas. The appalled one-sided communication from the NASA base in Florida. The unreal announcers who spoke from the TV like virtual inhabitants of a diving bell. And then it is time to go home. I help the children get bundled up for the fierce cold outside. For the first time in some time, I push their feet into their heavy boots for them. They hold onto their colored drawings in small mitten-clumsy hands. Outside, in the moonlight, we can hear the coyotes singing down in the coulee bottom, not that far away. On the drive out of the Club grounds, no one speaks, and the car slews around on the deep frozen corduroy on the gravel road up that swings up the coulee slope to the main road.

3. Feb. 5, 2003 and later…

That is my young son on the front page of the local paper.
His Astronomy Club held a Memorial at City Hall,
That sadness in his face may be learned but it is no less profoundly felt.
More genuine than the American President on Tuesday.

There is 250 mile long line of debris above Dallas.
Only weeks later, America will invade Iraq by mistake.
The family has forgotten our vacation in the Keys last summer,
And the decisions that we made to resolve a marital divide.

Habitation fog heaves up out of the coulees like a giant’s bedclothes.
In the news, burning plumes are replaced by missile-nose cameras.
My children get angry when their parents watch war on TV.