West Center Street was, not so long ago,
A kaleidoscopic flood come three o’clock:
Children in waves of blues, greens, and golds
Set free from Margiotti Elementary,
The more subdued hues of the men
Finishing first shift, at the Montmorenci Mills
All filling the sidewalk
Like some great jigsaw puzzle in continual motion.
Now, the color seems to have left us for greener pastures,
Only the faded, unevenly washed yellow buses
Which take the children
To the central school over in St. Mary’s remain,
Solemn faces forlornly pressed to the windows
As they pass the ungainly and obsolete building
Now dark and silent, squat and hunched-over,
And further on the mill, gates padlocked,R
rusted pieces of chain-link pointing accusatorily downward,
As if the fault for its closing
Lies with us and us alone.

Ah, but it was different, near enough in time
That the memories remain sharp, clear, biting
And they come back in curious bits and pieces,
Like how the Market Basket stayed open twenty-four hours
So the third-shifters could shop for groceries
Without having to short-change themselves on sleep,
The lights in Carter’s Depatment Store,
Bright as Heaven itself to six-year old eyes
Fixed wonderingly on an electric football game
Or a toy bridge of the Enterprise, complete with a transporter
Which made Spock disappear As Seen on TV,
Or how, when we went to the Friday fish-fry at the Kinzua House,
We would stop at every table,
Fathers exchanging greetings, finishing those jokes
Which the noise along the line had left incomplete.

You left, just like everyone else, but not for good, of course;
It was just a temp job to make some money
Until you’d saved up enough to help out your mom.
Once you got settled, you’d come back home
To visit—by Christmas, at the very latest.
We waited outside of the old Rexall for the Trailways bus
That would take you to Erie,
And after the shortest half-hour I’d ever known
We kissed at the curb and embrace
Until the driver intimated with his horn
That we either needed to say goodbye or get a room.
Still, I knew you’d be back, as, after all
There are bonds that time and distance cannot break.


That is all over now, and those dreams
Our parents clung to like rosaries,
Where our lives were better than what they had known
Have moved south to Charlotte, or Houston, or Birmingham;
The Market Basket closed, boarded and de-windowed;
Hell, you can’t buy a single gallon of milk
Between here and Ridgway,
And the Kinzua House long gone as well,
Save for the tattoo place that occupies the space
Where the bar once was,  
And once in a while, though less so every year,
You’ll catch one of the old-timers, frozen in time,
Staring at the smokestacks of the old mill
Ancient obelisks like those
Looming over the graves of the town’s founders
Tucked away in the old section of the cemetery
Up on Bootjack Hill,
The paths chock-full with weeds and briars,
The grass unmown for some three summers now.

*When I got your card, it was postmarked from Denver;
The temp gig hadn’t lasted as long as it was supposed to,
And it’s not like Erie is a boom town, after all.
Still, you were there long enough to meet someone,
Someone, you noted who was looking ahead,
Not over his shoulder all the **** time;
Besides, you noted in your one
And ultimately failed attempt at humor
You remembered how our Geography teacher had once said
That all the land east of the Missisippi,
Even here in the foothills of the Endless Mountains,
Were simply mounds of dirt, old and dead,
While the Rockies were young, vibrant, still shifting and growing.
The card was one of those that come blank on the inside
So you can compose your own witty epithet,
As there are some sentiments so dreadful in their foolishness
That even Hallmark won’t touch them.

It is not, of course, a literal longing
An actual yearning for some terra firma unlike our own
(The vistas promised her elders
In the pages of children’s science encyclopedias,
Jetson-esque lunar traffic jams and hourly interplanetary shuttles
Failing to materialize as prophesied,
The future being a pastel, underwhelming version of our hopes)
But things unrealized, ethereal but substantial,
Their very lack of corporeality giving them a solidity,
A genuineness that those subjects of everyday aspirations
No longer possess, stripped of all semblance of magic,
And she has made a rather discontented compact with all of that,
Choosing to cast her lot with such that this plane has to offer,
But her memories can be fanciful things,
And not party to such contracts,
And in her mind she is whisked away to the bus ride
To see the cosmos projected on the school planetarium
In the cow-town school up in Poplar Ridge,
Her heart quickening as the darting stars
And the great, ponderous Jupiter
Waxed and waned on the building’s dome,
Her fifth-grade group among the last to see such a show
Before the gears in the works,
Impractical and wildly expensive to replace
Sheared and came to a halt for the final time.

Sing, you said, of the happy path life will take
Of carefree, languid days and party-filled nights,
Of endless summers at our home by the lake,
Of Paris and Milan to take in the sights.
So (my arm around your waist) I tell you this:
Cinderella and Snow White both lived a lie.
There’s no fairy godmother or prince’s kiss,
No carriage ride to some castle in the sky.
I will sing of liverwurst and fairy tales
Of hopelessly clogged sinks and vomiting cats,
Of threadbare lime green carpet and hidden nails,
Of overdue bills and heated, pointless spats
And how a smile from you will make any care
Vanish like the dew into morning’s warm

After so long we have returned
To reclaim all that we once spurned.
We cannot change what might have been;
Come meet me in the cool green glen.

The prudish reserve of our youth
Revealed to us no golden truth
With words writ large by flaming pen;
Come meet me in the cool green glen.

The modesty of childhood days
Has vanished like the morning’s haze
Let us embrace what we feared then;
Come meet me in the cool green glen.

The path of cautious restraint
Now bears the slightly tarnished taint
That falls upon all mortal men.
Come meet me in the cool green glen.

So all our reticence and fear
Has led us once again to here.
Just in time may not come again;
Come meet me in the cool green glen.

There is, I admit, no small attraction in the possession
Of the wand--but invariably that becomes obsession,
For magic bewitches all it touches, and woe to the man
Who, having discerned its methods and secrets, believes he can
Employ it yet stay unfettered and unscathed, without effect,
(As if the mere claim of enchantment would not make one suspect
Both the man and his motives), all sweet fruit without bitter rind.
Such men may find the verdict of peers and gods to be unkind,
(There exists no single point in time we fail to comprehend
That no simple act of wizardry postpones our mortal end)
For who among us remains impervious to Nature’s whims
Or time’s ravages--our concentration wanes, the eyesight dims,
Our hands shake, every bit as unsteady as our convictions.
So we carry on, with our exceptions and contradictions
Expertly hidden, in the hopes that, at least for a short while,
We can offset, through the employment of parlor tricks and guile,
The diminution of our gifts, fading of our faculties.
So, as we reach our denouement, what have our abilities
Brought us in the end, save the knowledge that our reputations,
No matter how great, serve as no match for our limitations?

I had been, through much of my youth,
Under the care and tutelage of my Uncle Virgil,
He being the sole remainder of my father and his brothers,
The rest taken by life’s wind and wuthering,
Anzio and clogged arteries, sneak attacks and suicides.
The final remnant of my patrimony
(But an anomaly among them,
Squat and blocky where his brothers had been all willowy height,
Bestowed a high reedy voice among a half-dozen baritones)
The one entrusted, due to attrition as well as temperament,
With the shepherding of the family farm
Through another generation
(The original design involved my father taking the reins,
But, though he came to the plowed rows, scrubby old apple trees
And lumpy moguls of the place with the hopes and misigivings
Of a soon-to-be- jilted suitor,
He was a dreamer, a man of little to no pragmatism,
Ill-suited to the grinding and unromantic nature
Of cutting dead cows from stanchions
And bringing order to barbed wire,
The mantle then falling to the youngest brother,
But he proved too easily enveloped in life’s minutiae,
And he departed with a locked garage door and idling engine,
The official version being terminal absentmindedness
While giving his antiquarian Buick a tune-up.)

I had come over to help out with the haying,
Its timing, even by small-farm standards,
Subject to Nature’s whims and caprices,
Process needing to be completed in narrow windows of time
When the tall grasses were just-so dry enough to cut,
Requiring marshaling the forces for attack
At a feverish pace before the next thunderstorm
Marched over the hills and ancient glacial moraines,
Leaving ill-timed efforts all for naught
(My contributions to the cause a hit-and-miss thing,
I being my father’s son after all.)
We’d finished up with some daylight to spare,
A thing to be celebrated,
My uncle and I repairing to the porch for beer and small talk.
In the course of ruminations upon things great and small,
I’d mentioned how I’d changed my considerations
On the ostensibly unchanging hillsides,
How they were once foreboding, claustrophobic things,
Walls to be surmounted like some pine-topped Maginot Line,
But now comforting, benign things,
Cradling me gently, almost imperceptibly yet lovingly.
Uncle Virg took a pull from the bottle and slowly shook his head,
What those hills are, boy, is dirt, just a bunch of **** rock
Ground up by the big ice, and it would have been nice
If they’d made a better job of it,
Not that they gave a tinker’s **** about us then or now.
Son, I listen to you talk, and I despair of you.
Why, what would your father say?
He took another drink, then laughed softly.
Oh, hell, never mind. I know what your father would have said,
We drank more or less in silence after that,
The sun making various sherbert pastels
Of reds and oranges and purples,
Though I thought it perhaps for the best
Not to comment upon that particular phenomenon.

We’d dallied with bright shining dreams, of course;
Gatsby-esque timetables and solemn pacts
Made with ourselves, come undone with brute force.
A bitter brew to quaff, but facts are facts;
We’re those workaday cogs we once foreswore
(Of no note at all save in mothers’ hearts)
Doomed to lurch forward while being no more
Than the shabby sum of commonplace parts.

Let us shelve tattered remnants of our ghosts,
And deign not to dwell on what could have been,
At last shaken free of our fathers’ boasts
(Praise God, no longer promising young men.)
Unshackled from that, then we can begin
To embrace the joy of just sleeping in.