Taps

I was keeper of the lost.

I turned my pillow to the cool side.
My parent's voices swam in and out,
darting minnows in a silver stream of sleep.
Talk of an illusive search for the right job
after forced retirement for disability.
Roaming the country, no place quite right.

Then dreams, images of clothes gravitating,
swinging onto hangers,
sliding over chairs. In a vast mystery,
like Twilight Zone, father’s favorite show,
clothes shifted in the dark.
They must have. I searched for them each morning.
Maybe a sweater gone AWOL.
Or shoes madly tap dancing,
shuffle, step, kick, hop, step
like Mom on the kitchen floor, spinning defying
the newly waxed surface. A shirt, starched stiff,
bouncing from the lid of its Samsonite barracks,
My mission each morning at every motel
and I was proud. Giddy even.
To open drawers. Explore closets.
Peer under beds. No matter no one remembered
unpacking suitcases that night or ever.
Except for cotton pajamas that Mother folds each morning
into pristine bundles. Orders from headquarters.

Before breakfast Father checked the odometer,
recording miles in a brown leather log book.
My older brother shoulders bowed,
lugged suitcases into the crisp salute of morning.
At seven a.m., precisely, to the bugle call
of  Let’s roll, the open road stretched before us.
On the hour, out of the car, family jumping jacks
on a mirage covered highway.
I loved mirages, counting them as father did miles.
Collecting them like ladybugs in jars of memory
where they sang lullabies only I could hear.

Noon sharp a stop for lunch. Five-
a motel with restaurant attached,
one that served beef vegetable soup,
very hot .Television: Gunsmoke, Rawhide
or Wagon Train, pioneers that never did arrive in California.
Always stuck in Nebraska or Wyoming.
Or Twilight Zone on Thursdays. Mother hated it,
took a walk with her beige cardigan
buttoned tight against the dark. Lights out at nine.
Master Sergeant diligence prevailed.

In my postcard album each new motel
looked strangely like the last,
so that they all seem
to be the same place
with the same possibility of loss.