Postage stamps and the portraits of our un-visited past.

My father collected stamps for
the number of places we only went
inside our heads-- botanical gardens
to bi-planes on their faces-- I thought
that his stamp book could be our memory museum-- 
in one portrait we sat beneath cacti in
Arizona and smoked cigars there
from the rib cage of our blue jeep--
He pointed out that the snakes slither
sideways and whip themselves like
licorice ropes and when he turned off
the engine there was silence with the caress of
arid breath across the sand--
we ran our fingers through each grain and built
a sandcastle fort on the shore of the 
Galapagos where my father would find me
the dragons that had their wings plucked
off like dandy lion heads-- we roared with them on the
shore of the creek where I learned that
both my father and me had eye lids made 
of stamps-- paper and soft that get
sweet like the pink packets of sugar approximation
on the counter of diners where my father made
air planes from napkin holds-- took
me with him on flights to Australia where
we could find toads the size of dinner plates--
eat supper off the kitchen table we made from
our own thighs-- seated on the bumper of the
blue jeep that held our bodies like the mother
who was waiting for us to come home--
she held potato rolls and crock pot pork chops--
at the door and talked about soybeans and porches--
But before we came back we needed to make a stop
in Canada-- cross the border at night so no one
would know we were vagabonds that hovered
on the fringe of postage stamp frames-- mailing
ourselves to zip codes with the nostalgia of the unknown--
he told me that the stars were as bright as they 
were ever going to get and we found constellations
I had only seen in planetariums.
We always saved just one stamp to return home 
(before midnight the witching hour)
We saved the postage from the final pages
of the stamp collection-- yellow-tooth protraits of Fleetwood 
that made the old melted main street look like a parade
in sugar-bloom-- with shiny wide-eyed cars and women
in hats that looked like wedding cakes. 
Most days I believe I have been there-- in Arizona 
and in Fleetwood, dressed up with my father to parade me
down main-street past the grand central tap room
where my mother orders crab cakes--
when I page through the sleeves of the stamp
books-- our scrap books-- we have been there
and here and before and after and still
home in time for dinner-- warm hand fulls 
of potato rolls.