I love the mess the blossoms make
on Main Street in my home town
a line left dangling in my head for years
urgent now that this New England street
version of an allée stands sentenced
to become its own death row
This rank and stank I’ve come to embrace
hooking around blind corners
jabbing the nose before the mind can defend
or make sense of the bout
going down for the count
at the onslaught of each spring
I’ll take the crush of petals under foot
sliming the concrete sidewalk slated for replacement
blowing in through the café’s open door policy
daring me to finally write this poem
before it’s condemned to eulogy
Before the faux
pavers and period lighting and parking lot plantings spring
into their big-box shapes and the street is stripped
of its crown in the name of bump-outs and adequate drainage
big money’s big picture with its hand-out
cashing in on the album of broken limbs
I thought last year would be the last
took some photographs and resigned myself
to this particular kind of climate change
convinced it won’t matter given forty years
a timeframe adequate for invasives like good tourists
to turn native or close enough for the next
blossoming of regrets
Not the first in this place or my memory
the elms having been replaced with weeping
crabs cut down one night twenty years ago for what
transgression I forget and I accept
the Bradford pears turned out
not to be the wisest choice
their elbows out at unfortunate angles
cradling snow and ice until the bough breaks and down comes
the wrath of a wrong-time wrong-parking-place god
but baby wasn’t that blanket of crusty white beautiful
And I won’t argue with the volunteer chief
who claims they block the second story
windows in case the rescue ladders need leaning
but damn what ragged heights you won’t see
climbed again in these tamed towns too soon
So given the forecast and the lost
pictures and words from my previous mistakes
I’ll take what measure I can of these
about-to-be-fallen
already molting and missing limbs
one last stinky silhouette before the scrubbing rains
even the notion of fruitless human chains
already stumped by a thousand cuts and the buzz
of the next model venture to rumble down the pike
–- Great Barrington, Mass.
May 2014
