Fixed In Amber

I've sorted through shadow shapes
behind my eyes
and sometimes there--
    I've seen it before --
an old lens fixes back on
my strange Blue Mountain home:
    Seneca, Mt. Vernon, Dayville;
they were accidental towns,
tied to the John Day River's
lonely gold.

I was a child in those mountains;
the lens-view softens to
a browning snapshot.
Seneca's roads,
    I see in amber,
are rough and generous
like handsplit fences.
Houses are outsize, inviting;
    no flinty edges.
I don't want to go back,
except through the amber lens.
But I will.
I'm told it's like being slapped
to go back now; houses fallen in
on themselves with pre-war planks
and peeled paint, shrunken down
like bleached-out line shacks.

But I will go back.
At the risk of leaving the feathery
lens in shards,
    someday I'll return.