The Sunday Poem: Greenfield

I grew up in one of those New England towns
that called its river a beach.
It took an hour to walk around the block
with its rounded corners, and even then you’d reach
just the place where you began. The sandy soil
that grew between the cement cracks called sidewalks
nurtured tough grass that coiled, plastered to the ground.
Way back in 1950, none of the houses’ doors had locks.
But they have for years.
                                    My house is smaller, taller,
attenuated by time. They tore the picket-fence down.
The old apple-tree faltered some time ago,
because nobody knows how to spray it. It stands alone,
the other fruit trees chopped to make way for lilacs.
The garden is gone. My neighbor died. A college has opened.
Progress.
                  Movies must lack an audience,
for the theater’s closed. The bookstore around the bend
is now across the creek; that’s where the readers are.
Quite a good place. But the roads can’t handle the traffic
in Greenfield. For cars, this is not the beaten path.
They probably pass it by, admiring the cows and laughing,
looking at the dry country hills and hay. Wise folks,
New Englanders.
                          Driving down the Mohawk Trail:
see signs and hopes rush by, like the birds
you drive over that will not fly away.
We all dangle wings into the soil, growing roots
from feathers, become crabapples turning
into moot points. When I look back,
the town is gone, swallowed by the bush, burning.

This poem dates back to 1990. That would be this Greenfield. I remember fishing on Quabbin Reservoir (and there’s a poem about that too), studying for first communion at Holy Trinity… I am sure the town has changed dramatically since my memories of it in the mid-70s.