no more

As a boy I raced my brother within the orange groves. His motor was faster off the line and he hummed ahead while my body rattled behind. We ducked low branches and at times almost fell avoiding fallen oranges from the trees, their bodies soft and pungent geometry amidst the din. It was wondrous even then to ride along the edges of the past, of what once was, of the stories my father and grandfather had told me of decades before.

My father told me of the groves spanning miles in all directions in the 1950's of his youth, of bodies dumped where no one of the city or emerging suburban gird seemed to dwell by a criminal element seeing the groves as a shadow across the land beyond Los Angeles. He also told me of how the central valley did not seem so far away then and how the first kiss under a shade tree smelling sweet was almost in its own place beyond that afternoon and all the details scattered waiting a few miles away.

Erasers tend to grind down an image but not to completely wear it away. Something always would remain, a trace, a smudge, an outline. I have somewhere in a bag amidst old books a collection of pictures I tried to wipe clean with the good old "pink pearlie". They almost look like maps, maps of what is not, measure left to shapes , outlines, gaps, and the desire to peer in at what is no more.