Hart, MI

My hometown in memory is

furrowed, like a field of asparagus in season,

twisted like the arthritic limbs of an apple orchard

gone on, crumbling like the agricultural plant

where us kids used to play

ghosts in the graveyard, weeds reclaiming the concrete

in that jungle where jobs decline

and old farmers backs are bent

from beating back the Tree of Heaven.

Like most lonesome and quiet places it was ideal

for rearing children but hell on adolescence.

Griswold Street at the bend, I remember

that reflective sign tagged by the class of ‘79

where once I’d walked with friends the night the car crashed

and the girl died, so young

I thought I touched mortality in that shard of broken chrome

that lay amongst the gravel permanently embedded

in my knee, having skinned it careening around the curve

a hundred thousand times.

Before I could drive, I knew it all by heart.

The segments of sidewalk lifted by trees,

the lake whose name was the same as the town,

in spring, the poplars pale yellow by the roadside stands,

the county roads that lost themselves

into two-tracks, the streets worn smooth as river stones,

and knew so little I thought it all

irrelevant. I don’t know

what happened before I was born,

who left the seal of the WPA

on the playground by the library,

or what my grandmother, beneath the black oak now

in that field of headstones across from the church on 72nd

could have told me about the Great Depression and the Grange.

But when I return in time,

the eyes of children are the same

as those whose in darkness dream

a country lost to the world.