Our band director started us up with eins,
zwei, drei, spiel. Was it ironic? An allusion
to tubas and oompahs? Dad said that during
the war, no one spoke German on the street.
If neighbors thought you were pro-German,
they came in the night to paint your house yellow.
I couldn’t stop them. I wasn’t born yet.
Oma and Opa talked over coffee, fields
beyond them dark with corn. Then the harvest,
then football, bands marching over hashmarks,
stepping into and out of formation. In junior high
there was suddenly too much to remember—
locker combinations, all the top fifty songs.
Records had flipsides, mornings their cornflakes,
the shadowed garden prosaic—peas, beans,
a row of petunias at the front. In 1960 the world
was ending so what was the point of naming bones
wired together and hung in a classroom?
Dad subscribed to a newspaper he had to parse
with a dictionary, sounding out remembered words.
The milkman set bottles of cold milk inside
our front door. Clink of empties he carried away.