for Zinzi
We were trapped in a town called Liberty.
Our cabin lay on top of a hill, where the snow
kept us caged for entire weeks at a time.
Down the dirt road, past a couple of bends,
lay the hamlet of Neversink, which of course
had been drowned by a reservoir. It was hard
to think of anything human around us as serious;
all man had built reeked of failure and rust.
We lived amidst the ruined remnants
of a Yankee frontier town – slumbering mills,
silent railroads, idle factories, gutted houses,
a few drowsy strip malls … It was the nonsensical
heart of Angry America, where descendants
of Unionists proudly flew Dixie flags
to spite the dark man in the White House.
The one half-decent bite to eat was at Stu’s:
a blue Kullman diner formerly on 49th and 11th
that got pushed out by franchises, then
exiled upstate on a flatbed, never to return.
When the mulch plant shut down, the sons
and daughters of Liberty debated at length
the great prospects before them: casinos
or fracking; but the rich second home-owners
fought the oilmen and won, so casinos it was.
‘Liberty, son,’ an old schoolteacher told me,
‘is where the past comes to die.’ Ain’t it funny to think,
my beloved, that this was where our future began?