Somersville Mill Pond

This is the second of two poems about Somersville, Connecticut, a village a few miles from where I lived as a child.

Scales of whitewashed asphalt

shingle the worker tenements

shading a few gray scabs of snow.

Wandering to the mill pond where

I fished half a century ago

I feel my tracks smack the mud

with a tiny inaudible lisp.

The silver wind on the water

hacks long herringbones of wave.

It’s too cold to stand here staring

at places too shy to resist the wry

nostalgia I doubt more than death.

The mill burned two years ago.

A cage of girders remains where

the more modern building stood.

Brick walls of the older complex

retain something Classical,

impersonal with great age.

I’d like to prowl along the edge

of the pond to find that distant view

of the Hubbard farm. I admired it

for the litter of farm equipment

that ornamented the barnyard

with Farmall red, John Deere green,

and rust in a hundred subtle hues.

I’d walk all the way to the bridge

where the town constable chased

four drunk teenagers who crashed

into the steel girders and burned

to death, one of them his son.

No one had the heart to concoct

the usual ghost story, and now

it’s too late, a modern concrete bridge

replacing the aged truss-work.

Retracing my tracks to the car

I’m sure the wind will remember

sculpting around me. It’ll leave

a hole in the atmosphere

that will shimmer in my absence

like the ghosts of those teenagers

scarred into the mid-spring dark.

Somersville Mill Fire

                                                               

A splay of heat-warped girders,

a tumble of brick. The mill burned

so abruptly firefighters arrived

as it tipped into the river

to fry a few dozen fish.

The whole village turned out

to bask in the glare. The ghost

of my Uncle Chet must have been there.

For decades he mended looms,

scuttling between angry machines

with tool kit and powerful thirst.

Drinking repeatedly killed him,

but he rose from his grave, returned

to work, again and again

until the mill closed forever.

Behind the brick complex a slew

of tenements where the sister

of a kid I knew in high school

took on all the boys, including

her brother. Her flesh lay warm

in summer light, warm as the wreck

of the mill as firefighters rolled

their hoses. The river churns

over a dam and through a trough

half-choked with debris. The mill pond

mirrors a featureless sky.

Fishing that still water bored me,

but my father liked the silence

and poise of watching his bobber

red and white on green-gray slick.

He must have wondered why Chet,

younger sibling, drank so deeply    

that he drowned his memory

of island war, a water-cooled

machine gun heavy on his shoulder.

I kick a few bricks and turn my back

on the wreck of the mill. No use

clearing the rubble for parking lots—

no reason to park here, nothing

to the village but a few houses,

a brown brick school, wooden church.

The pond shivers. Early spring

and the smell of fire two years ago

still brisk and bitter on the tongue.