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.
