<b>"The Long View" – Cameron K. Gearen</b>

It should have been the fear that lasted.
Shadow on a wall. Should have been
the moments of insight or revelation, staring,
mute, over the cliff at the whole thing below.
A holiday of the mind, garlanded in tinsel.
Christmas Eve and Uncle Jim's in Elmhurst
and cousins whose names I don't know and Great
Grandma's angel food cake sopping up ice cream.
Outside, snow. Chicago winter.
Socks from a godparent.
Should have been high up places, Great Wall,
Eiffel Tower, Space Needle. Endless
steps snaking up a Florentine bell tower,
the square sprawled below, umbrellas, pigeons.
Or danger. The bus toward Dege,
washed-out bridge. Scorpion and jellyfish.
But it was the waking up and blinking at the sky
and turning back to sleep another hour.
My father's body. Grave nurses wheeling him
away, the shoes I wore that night,
April 8, 1984, three-toned sneakers, too bright
for the occasion, it turned out. Next time
I saw him he was orange. Not yet forty.
And if I live long I'll never stop seeing
his face. Slack chin, Dutch nose, eyes
drooping downward at the corners. He
lasts because he didn't last. The peach dress
I wore, summer I was eight. Not the nuns.
Texas summers, Mum and Pappy's house
with pink shutters. Crossing Augusta,
Iowa, Division twice each day, the way
to St. Giles. Where the mind holds love,
it lets detail go. Mornings, evenings, days
and then the frost comes and we do it
all again. We step out onto hard
earth, stand on the rise, survey the fields.
The heart meanders through the chest.
The view from up here stuns, dizzies.

Cameron K. Gearen was born in 1969 in New Haven, Connecticut, and grew up in Oak Park, Illinois. She won the Grolier Prize in 1994 and placed third in Painted Bride Quarterly’s 1997 Poetry Contest. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Crazyhorse, River Styx, Quarterly West, Third Coast, Northwest Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Bloomington, Indiana, with her husband, Andy, and their toddler daughter, Cleo.