Hometown for an Hour: Poems

Postcard from Herring Brook Road

Postcard from Herring Brook Road for Vanda Sendzimir High tide marbleizes the salt marsh, the bay’s elegant endpaper, while a breeze swirls in its ruffles and shadows. Gulls blow around like whole sections of newsprint no one will read now. A red-winged blackbird flashes by. His colors saturate the air, lush as Sunday’s rotogravures. Wind in the trees is made of taffeta and does not tear. . . . One Scotch pine’s candelabras—like sconces from a hundred torn-down Roxies—transform the marsh to a movie’s vast proscenium, the endless stage of Thirties musicals, too enormous to be real. Dawn’s chorus girls rehearse at random—sweet chaos, not cacophony. A few herons audition for extras’ positions with the corps de ballet while fiddler crabs sit in their orchestra pit till the union rep tells them to play. (Or are they a marching band at some cancelled game, the soggy field in disarray, each heavy claw a tuba that can’t be put away?) The bay seems merely metaphor—the backdrop 19 You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. for a grade-school Pinafore, dry as the whitecaps buoying Botticelli’s Venus on her scallop. I’m used to it close up—its waves bathing my feet like priests at Easter—but just this once I’m grateful for the distance, and respite from its deep and dark persistence. 20 You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. ...