​POETRY  
 
"Outside our train, Alaska passes huge:"
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Tourist 
by Dan Liberthson

​​Outside our train, Alaska passes huge:
cloud framed mountains insistent white,
closer aspen's golden rivers
flooding deep green spruce.
With calf, a mother moose flees,
 
casting over her shoulder
a glance of reproach.
I try to think my thoughts,
feel feelings of beauty, ecstasy.
Instead, a whack on my knee.
 
He can’t be more than four,
this darkhaired, broadfaced boy
racing up and down the aisle
that is to him perhaps
horsetrack, dragstrip, spaceship.
 
More real to him his inner world
than the outsized grandeur
rushing past windows hard
to see from even standing on a seat.
Lost behind his face, reflected back
 
more fascinating every moment,
he smiles to find himself safe against
the strange world, palms flat on the cold pane,
and marvels at his bracketing prints,
squealing at so fine a thing, him.
 
Now he's down again, off to his races,
but this time I catch him as he hurtles
past, throbbing body, and hold.
I've tapped into a dynamo: electric
juice bubbles through my hands.
 
His head turns slowly and he looks
through me as if I were Alaska,
very large but irrelevant.
Please don’t bump into me, I say.
I smile, and he studies my face
 
wonderingly, as I would a landscape.
He smiles back, some recognition made.
Look for a moose, I say, making antlers
of my arms and hands. He nods,
large-eyed, backs, and spins off.
 
I turn to the window and see a waterfall
diving silver down three hundred feet.
Pulled from myself, newborn from mother,
I feel beauty's cold sparkle on my skin,
spume of time sinking, not to come again.
 
Will that boy think of me in sixty years
when I am dead and he fondly
reaches for his early memories
to save of himself what he can,
to fix his print against the Cold?
 
Will he wonder why he remembers
my strange hands and face
among his parents’, his aunties’, his own?
Or will he know by then that he remembers
because this foretaste of awakening
 
was but the first in a lifetime when
the world would reach out and grip
amid his games and say pay attention
if you want to live. Dream on
and you'll never get off the train.
 
Will his memory be all that’s left of me?
I have come to find the pitiless blue
at the core of glaciers, to be shrunk
by the uncaring bulk of mountains
and being small, to lose myself
 
in a rushing world that holds and drops me.
The love of mother moose for calf offers
safety amid tumult; the wild land
saturate with passing beauty
offers peace amid the riot of change.
 
I watch the boy's receding back.
He turns toward me again an old man
whose flake of memory is all I am―
one who kindly woke him to the world.
If that's what's left of me, let it be enough.

*  Author’s Note: “Tourist” was published in Animal Songs (2010), by Dan Liberthson.
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​Dan Liberthson was born in Rochester, NY. He attended Northwestern University and SUNY at Buffalo (PhD, English), has retired from a career as a medical writer, and lives in San Francisco and Cottage Grove, OR. He has published five books of poetry and individual poems in many journals, including The Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, South Coast Poetry Journal, Elysian Fields Quarterly, and Chaminade Literary Review. Dan has also written The Bluejay Contrivance, a spy novel, and The Golden Spider, a young-adult fantasy novel. Currently Secretary of the Oregon Poetry Association, Dan took second place in the William Stafford Memorial Award Poetry Contest (2020) and in the Maine Poets Society Contest (2022).  
Other works in this issue:
Poetry:
​In Memory of Susan Eastwood
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Vistas & Byways Review is the semiannual journal of fiction, nonfiction and poetry by members of Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at San Francisco State University​.​
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