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.