 This poem is called History Lesson. Sorry. How's that? Okay. This poem is called History Lesson. Unlived history is a seed of doubt deferred. When you meet the players in our graves and tomes, or when you sit up in the middle of the night, I have lived so many years, a strange utterance given your age. It falls from conversation where someone exhales a scrim of smoke, or where they candles spent in a party. You exit from sleep to your dim house, scattered with nightlights, for visiting family who don't know their way, you tiptoe amongst sleeping relations. A laptop screen is winking in the kitchen. Good thing you own a telescope and a tape recorder. Things get lost on the internet. That strange universe, hardly a vessel of consciousness. It's saddest illusion that multitudes contain you. So glide through the sleeping house, part the curtains in the snoring living room. The in-laws say secretly, they've always doubted your buying power, but the stars are out. You say we got this far, didn't we? But never to anyone's face. Out the window, out there, you flew in from elsewhere on that stretch of sky once. It's easy to believe in past lives when considering the present. A niece smiles in her sleep, pills on the coffee table, keep the elder heart's regular, though the stars are fading like this bout with wakefulness. Past the uncorrupted sleep of innocence and experience pulls blankets up to chins, adjusting stuffed animals. Passing laden bookshelves, it seems, you have hauled entire shelves from Mr. Farlingeddy's reading room up to this word-crammed, flat, one volume at a time, and to the brink of divorce. But someday, they'll all thank you. For these containers of consciousness are old, newfound words. The next ones on the path, assembling and sorting. Solid meanings locking against one another, earning their keep. A foothold in stories that tell you stories you tell. Towards your ascension to what you could not say except that life has you. History has found you, not the other way around. How un-American yet, how at ease are these sleepwalking bones. In San Francisco, a republic all its own.