Here's a still life set in apple orchards on the plains of Oz,
a meadow heath just due east of Mesa Verde--
today the game is lilting out beyond 21-2, girls lifting
their breasts to the sky before it's 1942, before it's
too late to turn back, before it's time to translate
every Nisei myth as a mote in the pensioned fist
of Buddha. Before smiles, fumbling gestures
in a native tongue--respect for foreign fatherland
redoubled--the strain's so much that many grandkids
won't live out their thirties in this dirty kingdom
of the proud we call Camp Topaz. This cage of bliss,
the concentration camp we're careful not to speak of
at the store, spreads past concertina wire of a gabled
Methodist church, sheer of the fabric of the final tale.
My friend's father spent three years here counting tokens
in a coin-op laundromat--the Grand Tetonic armature
is a winter landscape Ansel Adams and Hiroshima's
Hersey can't resist: the pleasures of dust-hut
desert music of the purpled hills, where a white-laced
volleyball socks up over word-shy players, and apogees
the earth to overlap a reeling and burgeoned moon.

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