They still weep;
Not as often in those early days
When the telegram delivery boy,
Every bit as foreboding as the Grim Reaper,
Had arrived at their particular doorstep,
But at odd, importune times:
When the light shines just so in his old bedroom,
(Some instances just as he left it,
Other times clean and empty
As if never occupied at all)
The sound of boys playing baseball
In the field on the Klondike Road,
The bells at the Methodist Church
Ringing for another young couple.
Still, the world rolls along
In its own diffident manner:
There are cars, butter, and gasoline now,
Young men who were at Midway and Omaha Beach
Are back on the line at the mill,
Their mothers plan weddings
And buy dresses from Larson’s down in Ridgway.
They may pause briefly if they catch something
In the eye of a friend
Who has no need to buy frocks
Or reserve banquet halls,
And they will say, casting down their eyes a bit
Life goes on, I guess.
Yes, but they still weep

The song played-- muffled, hesitant,
As if the tabletop jukebox
Seemed unsure of the tune’s suitability,
As out of place and time as ourselves,
It being Wednesday morning three A.M.
At the all-night diner on the Klondike Road
(The mills, going full-bore down the road in Montmorenci Falls
Making such a place viable, indeed necessary),
But we laughed loudly and nonchalantly
Between bites of nearly adequate cheeseburger,
Ostensibly unaware of all those inevitabilities
Which were tangible but unspoken, indeed unspeakable,
This being the last of the last summer not careworn,
Textbooks to be exchanged for neckties,
Plastic sandals swapped for sensible flats,
Other lives to take flight in other places,
A mere handful of evenings remaining
Before the clumsy process of untying
All that which had been loose ends from the beginning.

Would I go back?  In a sense, it does not matter.
There was always a laundry list of reasons
That it could not be, cannot be, will not be:
Irreparably meshed gears of relocations and reconciliations,
Gordian knots of logic and desire.
Still, in my dreams, I often run like a madman,
Chest burning as my sneakers slap the pavement in the darkness,
Back toward the diner, but it has been razed to the ground
(Likely the case, for all I know,
What with the mills silent and padlocked all these years)
And I paw madly, feverishly through the rubble
In search of some remains of those vinyl chanteuses of love songs,
Those epitaphs of our failures,
Those three-minute odes
To our compromised and conditional successes.

They do not, like their more esteemed Californian cousins,
Sweep into town over sloop-festooned, canvas-checkered waters,
Passing over the remnants of missions
Packed with the ghosts of Christian guilt and romantic swashbucklers;
They labor at their workaday altitude just above the treetops
Still budding in the newness of May,
Pausing to rest on the jagged orange chain-link
Which surrounds the dormant mills,
Or perhaps a sill fronting a boarded window at the old school
Before taking to their summer quarters at the abandoned quarry
A couple of miles up the Klondike Road,
and invariably one of the old-timers will say
Little birds hain't much too look at,
But at least they come back every year,
And then not giving the simple brown creatures another thought,
As they find no particular interest in the notion of flight.