Grew up in a trailer camp, learned to read
& think about the hard world I saw across
the country road: wide-open fields, wind ripped
soil & days when blizzards howled as if a prairie
edged us into scrub-pine & second growth oaks

Childhood played its nightmare moments
through nights when ghosts & more ghosts
kept wailing against the trailer’s thin tin skin

But we weren’t alone & we were well fed
& afraid of getting in trouble, so we learned
not to get caught – how to lay lower than
a cop’s beam that swept any escape route

Those years of winter afternoons spent playing
in gullies & hollows which filled with water & froze
huge ponds for us to skate around on for hours
today, measure the very pace of my breathing