Town or poem, I don’t care how it looks. Old woman
take my hand and we’ll walk one more time these streets
I believed marked me weak beneath catcalling clouds.
Long ago, the swamp behind the single row of stores
was filled and seeded. Roses today where Toughy Hassin
slapped my face to the grinning delight of his gang.
I didn’t cry or run. Had I fought him
I’d have been beaten and come home bloody in tears
and you’d have told me I shouldn’t be fighting.
Wasn’t it all degrading, mean Mr. Kyte sweeping
the streets for no pay, believing what he’d learned
as a boy in England: ‘This is your community’?
I taunted him to rage, then ran. Is this the day
we call bad mothers out of the taverns and point them
sobbing for home, or issue costumes to posturing clowns
in the streets, make fun of drunk barbers, and hope
someone who left and made it returns, vowed
to buy more neon and give these people some class?
The Dugans aren’t worth a dime, dirty Irish, nor days
you offered a penny for every fly I killed.
You were blind to my cheating. I saw my future certain—
that drunk who lived across the street and fell
in our garden reaching for the hoe you dropped.
All he got was our laughter. I helped him often home
when you weren’t looking. I loved some terrible way
he lived in his mind and tried to be decent to others.
I loved the way we loved him behind our disdain.
Clouds. What glorious floating. They always move on
like I should have early. But your odd love and a war
taught me the world’s gone evil past the first check point
and that’s First Avenue South. I fell asleep each night
safe in love with my murder. The neighbor girl
plotted to tease every tomorrow and watch me turn
again to the woods and games too young for my age.
We never could account for the python cousin Warren
found half starved in the basement of Safeway.
It all comes back but in bites. I am the man
you beat to perversion. That was the drugstore MacCameron
flipped out in early one morning, waltzing
on his soda fountain. The siren married his shrieking.
His wife said, “We’ll try again, in Des Moines.”
You drove a better man into himself where he found tunes
he had no need to share. It’s all beginning to blur
as it forms. Men cracking up or retreating.
Resolute women deep in hard prayer.
And it isn’t the same this time. I hoped forty years
I’d write and would not write this poem. This town would die
and your grave never reopen. Or mine. Because I’m married
and happy, and across the street a foster child
from a cruel past is safe and need no longer crawl
for his meals, I walk this past with you, ghost in any field
of good crops, certain I remember everything wrong.
If not, why is this road lined thick with fern
and why do I feel no shame kicking the loose gravel home?