And another poem from 1993:  A 25-year Reunion Directory, when the catering groups for reunions were only starting up,  was mailed over three months after the event...

A SERIES OF EVENTS IN JANUARY 1993

 

The arrival of the reunion directory

was supposed to culminate a series of four events.

I bought wool on sale

and sewed an A-line skirt,

gray plaid with a line of brown.

I biked in my black jeans for the Sunday

smelter smokestack demolition.

 

I stood two hours in cold on Sunday

in a clear view on a lot with many others,

until they set off charges in the stack

and a puff crawled up the base

and it began to tip, then collapsed

all in a shimmer, down, and that

was how it vanished.  Then I pedaled back.

 

I wore the skirt on Monday for the march

when they changed the name of K-Street

to Martin Luther King, Jr. Way.  It means

the area is African-American, now,

despite the Valhalla Temple.  Strange,

yet not at all, to walk below the temple

windows behind some Indians.

 

My mother would not have winked an eye.

And would have played piano,

my father filled prescriptions

where it is now Browne's Star Grill.

 

When the storm woke me

on Inauguration Day

I dressed in the skirt and a pink sweater.

In the cold and dark of the wind

a panel of fresh tar paper

blew off the roof past my window,

but my radio batteries were good.

 

Later, when I phoned about the directory, 

they explained rather riskily, already

over three months, they had been

out of power, like so many all weekend long.