She has maintained a steadfast and prudent distance
From places she would have to fabricate answers to tiresome inquiries:
The ageless Rexall pharmacy, the gas pumps at the Kwik-Fill,
The scruffy, three-checkout Market Basket,
(Though that entails driving to Bradford or Dubois for groceries,
Inconvenient at the best of times,
Outright hazardous when February shows its teeth)
But her resolve can be a fleeting thing,
So oftentimes she will yield
To the siren song of the produce aisle,
Where she will, with what forbearance she can bear,
Submit to the interrogative small talk
Lobbed her way like so many verbal mortar shells
By squinting, smirking long-time acquaintances,
All variations upon the inquiry Why’d you come back?

All homecomings are secondary to some departure,
Mostly the mad flight of one marooned by birth,
Deciding, through some alchemy of grit and desperation,
That they cannot face a life of a spot on the line at the mill,
A haphazard and half-hearted marriage with the requisite offspring,
To be finished up with an unremarkable stone on Bootjack Hill.
Her farewell was not such a notion, not in the least;
She was beautiful, not small-town pretty
In the lead-in-the-senior-musical sense,
But breathtakingly so, the kind of radiance
Which held up to the forty-foot screen of the drive-in in St. Mary’s.
There was no question that she would go, must go,
As if the notion of her staying was absurd, even obscene;
So she went, to New York for a brief spell
(She found it gray and cold in every sense of the word)
Then later to Southern California,
Which she found, if nothing else, somewhat more comfortable.
She did not fail (to be fair, her beauty was of a type
Which transcended mundane concerns such as locality)
Securing bit parts on screen here, the odd photo shoot there,
Not well-off, perhaps, but living well enough,
Free from the endless cast-iron skies and ***** slush of January,
The pointless yet sacrosanct internecine struggles
Which rolled unheedingly across the generations,
The stifling intramurality of the tiny lives in tiny mill towns.

And yet she came back, with neither warning nor fanfare,
Greeted by a cacophony of mute and uncomprehending stares,
As if she were some spectre, lovely and yet unwelcome,
Dredging up emotions best forgotten,
Half-truths not bearing the weight of re-examination,
Any number of errors of commission and omission best left buried.
She will, on occasion, make her way to a barstool at the Kinzua House
Where she receives drinks and further ministrations
From out-of-town hunters or younger townsmen
For whom she is not an icon or grail,
And if she is asked what brought her back to the cold cow country
She would say, a bit acerbically but melancholy as well,
At some point, you get tired of being a commodity,
Just something to weighed and assayed,
Your face worth this, your *** worth that,
But, if she was deep enough into the evening’s proceedings,
She would murmur snippets of odd things:
How the falls would pour like the cheers of thousands
Over the spillways of the dormant mills,
The spectacle of the sand swallows returning
(Brown, chunky, unremarkable things
Skimming the disintegrating chain-link
Which surrounded the abandoned middle school)
To the abandoned gravel pit just below the cemetery,
The herds of elk, reintroduced by the state conservation boys
In a futile and wholly romantic gesture,
Which have not only survived
But prospered on the hillsides out of town,
And if those who knew her when overheard her,
They would whisper among themselves
As to how she was clearly on the run from something,
And how everyone knows that the unrelenting SoCal sunshine
Can lead someone from a place like this to madness.

The historical marker, doubtless wearily press-stamped
By some inmate at Attica or Dannemora,
Refers to the relic as St. Leger’s Tower,
Though those old-timers who have not died off or fled south
Prefer the name “Barry’s Folly”,
As the general in quesiton was reported to have claimed
That it would stand, like Empire itself,
***** and unsullied for a dozen centuries,
Indeed several hundred years beyond as well.
All that lingers now is the main of its foundation,
Topped with no more than an uneven row or two of brick,
Sitting squat and forlorn like some drowsy and unconcerned sentry
Standing guard for the nearby entrance
To an old, long since abandoned cemetery
Where the stones of the war dead and early settlers
Have been washed clean of names, dates, and epitaphs
By the tainted, corrosive rains
Which once rolled in from Gary, Flint and Hamtramck,
And further up the hill, a weathered and peeling billboard
Invites those unwitting travelers who have wandered off the Thruway
To experience the magic of Herkimer Diamonds.

She played, as I remember, quite well,
Her talent settling into some interval
Between “capable” and “professional,”
A knack which would have allowed her
To play coffeehouses at some middling state school,
Or accompany some infant’s lilting lullaby,
But she’d set up shop, as it were,
In rather unusual and commercially unpromising spots:
Less-traveled side streets, the odd dead-end and cul-de-sac,
Even the occasional unpaved byway
(I’d first encountered her, during my walking, brooding stage
On a hilly road just outside the village,
At a point where the tarmac took
An unplanned two-hundred-foot vacation.)
She’d set up as if she expected a crowd,
Case open like two upward palms to receive a cascade of change,
And she performed songs designed to please the masses:
Beatles hits, folk ditties our parents sang to us as little ‘uns
For which I rewarded her with a dime here, a quarter there,
And, once and once only,
A fiver I’d snuck out of my father’s wallet
(He took it out of my hide, and then some)

There had been no romance, per se;
I’d sat close to her, hand on a Levi-ed knee,
And there was the odd kiss, as much brotherly as anything else,
But there were understood limits, never spoken of,
As there was something in her bearing, her posture, her very essence
Which said This is what is, what shall be, and what only ever can be.
A reticence which exercised dominion over all things
(The whys and wherefores over her very presence an Exhibit A;
She said she lived over in Wilcox, but she had no car, no bike,
And that particular irritant in the highway
A good six miles off as the crow flies)
So there was little now, and even less could be,
As it was my final summer of a single, uncomplicated home address,
Being bound elsewhere for the first
In a series of institutions of higher education,
So there was no ever after, happily or otherwise.
I’d never heard what happened to her after that,
Where she may have gone, what may have become of her,
Unaware of any tragic event engendering heart-rendering fiction,
But midway through my freshman year, one of the town newsletters
(Mimoegraphed back-and-front missives
Which my mother sent religiously)
Noted that the last unpaved road in the township
Had  finally been blacktopped,
Which I celebrated, in a fashion,
With a ****** heroic in intent and scope
Ending, as such things often do,
In a near-compulsive fit of weeping,
And my fellow revelers asked Man, what the hell has gotten into you?
And I suspect it was being bereft of an answer
Which had set me off in the first place.

Well, why not me, I reasoned
(No surprise to friends and loved ones,
As I have always considered my time
On this spinning patch of rock
As something of a monument to the value of pragmatism)
But there were still the normal sine-wave vacillation
Between tenuous optimism and odds-driven grim reality,
Fanciful discussions of Chinese herbs and Mexican clinics
And, later still, of time frames and stock transfers,
All the while various folks attired in suits and clinic coats
Debating matters pertaining to the coda of my personal symphony
(Doing so as if yours truly wasn’t even in the room)
Until, deciding my input might be somewhat pertinent, I said
If it’s all the same to you, I would like to go home.

It was, in a sense, like getting back on an old Schwinn
(Fender dented, rubbing on the front tire just the least little bit,
The chain needing oil, grudgingly giving in
To the demands of the crank)
Sitting, unused but inordinately patient, next to the barn,
The whole notion of settling back into a pace you’d forgotten,
Like dialing back a metronome from allegro to andante
Without missing a beat or flubbing a note.
What’s more, there were the sensations you’d never made time for
While under the thumb of daily deadlines and train schedules,
Greeting you like friends you hadn’t seen for twenty years
But started gabbing with as easy as slipping on old jeans:
The scent of the lilacs, overpowering but borderline mystical,
The informal yet precise ballet of the cattails and jewelweed,
The fields of cows that, even though you know it can’t be the case,
Are populated by the same Bessie and Bossie
You taunted and pelted with watermelon as a child
(I have made it a point to proffer my apologies),
The dark, pine-choked hills,
Formidable but accessible, even comforting.
Sometimes, when I am not paying attention,
I catch myself all but tearing up,
And I say to myself, ever so softly,
As not to disturb the squirrels and the wrens,
I had almost forgotten.  Christ forgive me,
I had almost forgotten.


I’d assumed (sometimes, I can be astounded
At the full extent of my own foolishness)
That she would merely take a leave of absence;
She has, after all, an alphabet full of advanced degrees,
A rainmaker’s reputation and the billable hours to match.
Columbia and Harvard Law, after all,
But she grew up down the road just a piece in Ebensburg,
So this is all part and parcel of her as well
Hard coded in the DNA for better or worse, she’ll say,
All the while shaking her head and laughing softly.
Surely you don’t want to stay here, I’ll say,
Boorishly rational in the face of everything
Which would argue to be otherwise,
You’ve read enough Forbes and Fortune;
Altoona is dead, Johnstown is dying,
And she allows that, for a time, coming back
Was the source of some misapprehension on her part,
Until it dawned on her that on those rare occasions
It had occurred to her to glance skyward in mid-town,
She had seen faceless tiles of windows
Sufficient to sheet a Great Pyramid,
An Armageddon’s worth of angels and gargoyles in the cornices,
But she had not, even once, ever seen the stars.

We need more Martians , they nattered at me all the time,
More monsters—people like to be scared,
As if those callow youngsters,
Growing up with two cars in the garage
And three sets at the country club,
Their fraternity mixers at Whittier or Occidental,
Knew the first **** thing about terror.
Still, they wanted me to grind out the harum-scarum hokum
They enjoyed watching two-reelers on Saturday afternoons
While men were doing hard work in Leyte and Manila,
As if the transitory fear of some ghoulish bogeyman
Would last through the thirty-second epics
Featuring some cartoon bear shilling for beer
Or bunnies extolling the virtues of toilet paper.
Let me tell you what fear is, I would say time and again,
It’s a padlocked fence and a smokestack
Which isn’t churning out a **** thing.
It’s the jobs you can’t get because you said something
(And more likely, you didn’t) twenty years ago.
It’s one more envelope from the bank or the phone company
With bold red lettering on the front
That you don’t open because you know what it says
And how it doesn’t matter one bit,
Because you can’t do a ******* thing about it,
And these promising young men would just look at me
Like I was some poorly made-up extraterrestrial
From one of their Buck ******* Rogers potboilers.

Several of my neighbors here were among the men,
Mostly boys in truth, who marched with the 126th New York,
Taking fire at Petersburg and The Wilderness,
At Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor.
We have spoken about the horrors of war,
The kaleidoscope of confusion and dread,
No direction leading to shelter, no road guiding the way to home.
They have said that, as frightening as the sound of the minie *****,
Zipping overhead like malevolent flies,
And the cannon were, what they found truly awful
Was the manner in which those fields,
So like the ones where they had flushed out quail as children,
Became foreboding nightmare landscapes,
Containing a dark madness
That they never dreamed could have existed.

This thing—unsanctified, uncertified
(Reminiscent of an old, familiar sweater
Comfortable, perhaps a bit threadworm here and there,
Yet wholly functional)
Has become unwound,
Not in some spectacular supernova
Replete with shouting and finger-shaking,
But slowly, almost imperceptibly becoming patchy and care-worn
Until such point it no longer provides much
In terms of comfort or warmth,
A failure of evolution more than an excess of passion,
A matter of recalculation as opposed to recrimination.

Let us proceed onward, then, with as much decorum as we can muster.
Parse the checking statements, divvy up love seats and ottomans
With an emphasis on equity rather than enmity,
Leaving the plates and cups intact
Passing them on (a bit dewy-eyed, perhaps)
To begin anew in some niece’s college apartment
Or with other friends who shall gallantly attempt
To complete and compute what we could not,
Divining some math which leads not to our own aftermath
Of reasoned rumination in search of some cold consolation.

His oaths were all crimson passion,
(Oh, fleeting, evanescent boy!)
But were simply passing fashion,
Discarded like some broken toy
Put on or off as he saw fit
(Not employed for some higher good:
The fondling of some harlot’s ***,
The plucking of some maidenhood.)
Prolifigate in the bedroom
In constancy, he remained chaste
Cast in the role of a bridegroom
The play’s ending he brought in haste
(I say this without levity;
Forever is but brevity.)