I’m done now with the dark houses of the East.
My hometown.
The book is closing on my generation.
*
Skinner satin mills
long gone to producing brass & machine gun clips
& milk bottle caps
are now themselves long gone.
And the orchard of 10,000 apple trees
that fed our insatiable boyish hungers —
a wilderness of stumps and weeds.
*
Even the river’s changed course,
leaving Walpole’s cove bleached & dry, where, in winter,
local farmers sawed thick blocks of ice,
skidding them up a frozen ramp to waiting wagons,
horses named Belle & Sophie stamping & steaming & shaking
their harnesses until they rang.
*
My Polack neighbor’s dairy farm’s now a golf course,
tees & greens & easy fairways.
We once killed black snakes there through the long summers
& forking up corners,
saved the sweet-smelling, windrowed hay from oncoming rain,
chaff stinging our sweat drenched bodies like shirts of nettle.
*
So what’s to say when a whole chunk of your life
comes up missing?
You say to yourself, “Well, there it is.”
Or. “Well, there it was. Wasn’t it?”
*
God’s his own voyeur.
*
After more than half a century,
I walk the town with the only man who knows my name.
*
Soon, I’ll bury my own shadow & slip away like sunlight.
*
Simplicity’s what I’m best at.
*
In the end,
a small box of a house by the sea.
No electricity.
No running water. Dirt floored.
Prayer,
wind & slapdash from the whereafter. |
