Skywave

Skywave

A winter-landscape photo,
Iowa, deep in snow. “It’s not as bad this year,”
A friend writes. He prints it out
and puts it beside another,
same season but much further back:
a beautiful girl beside a Christmas tree
in a Polaroid bent with fingerprints.

That winter it was cold in northern Virginia.
Driving to her over the snow one night
he heard downtown Des Moines on the radio,
as clear as nearby Washington.
A midwestern voice said calmly
that the temperature was ten below,
more frigid than Manassas, and far away.

A game he played as a child involved
twisting for those distant voices
that sometimes, very late,
when local stations had signed off,
were suddenly there, clear as if
coming from the next room
in the sound that lit up the dial.

Recollections like rocks on water:
Southern California, lacking snow,
and a clear, fading signal from long ago.

Kelley Dupuis