It Was Painted There Like Yesterday

It was painted there like yesterday across the sky
as if Mr. Roosevelt had finally hired
poor artists to re-create in mural memory
of families driving across America
under spectacular summer clouds
to places arrived at after hours of alphabet:
Get out and stretch,
past wooden signs and into trees
where on the sultry trail
each shadowed step refracts exactly
childhood recollection of such sandy places, where the pine
holds in its fractured bark the promise
of strange campsites and the scent,
dreamlike as your own family in this foreign place,
of hot dogs, smoke, and insect spray.

Having disposed of all the trash,
I drove back to the present from the sky.

July 12 2010