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Evanston PostcardThe elms are dead. The old library's gone.The war is over in Vietnam. A sign mentions the Internet so I can't pretend it's 1968. The old library had a fireplace with real fires all winter long. Different songs blare from radios down at the lake. Waves pound the beach like a migraine headache. Do airraid sirens drill still each Tuesday at ten- thirty? I thought the garbagemen were poor but they were only dirty. Petunias were tornadoes planted by the neighbors from Greece or Germany, some regime. At least four countries called our block home. That maple we planted when my brother was born no longer swoons in the wind; it's just blank lawn. I didn't know the P.O. was W.P.A. How little I knew before we moved away. I saw the garage where my mother died. I don't think she knew how her suicide would change us. How little we remember. Hometowns trap the past in tiny bits of amber: the store where shoes were bought each fall; the township pool; the heady smell of lilacs. Then comes the future's wrecking ball. I wander streets I walked down then but now I'm her age, not ten, though I don't know how that happened. I dreamt this visit anyway. The real town's stopped, my own Pompeii, when Chandler's still sold Girl Scout outfits and Field's was open, making profits. It's summer. Children play outside. Time will never reach the day she died. (first appeared in Willow Review.) |
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Issue #9, May, 1999 :
Santa Fe Poetry Broadside.