Deserted Village II (Willowbrook) (01/06)

How spoiled I was to the buzzing of these summer fields,
the roadside vegetable stand abandoned by the daughter
overburdened with tomatoes and the heartiest of cucumbers
and across her folding card table, a nineteenth century graveyard,
with the slate headstones chased with weeping willows,
and how many Wentworths or Tarboxes lay below the sod
while my co-worker slumped in his chair or stayed glum
as the company for which we worked fell deeper in debt.
That wouldn’t stop corn from growing, stop the millstream
From trickling water from its dam, stop swimming turtles
Who relax and expand their flippers once in their element,
Coast by rusted cable-strands or hubcaps flung in as a prank.
In the barn, the old machinery was still intact, depression-era tractors
With chokes no one in our day and age would know how to adjust,
Some quixotic silver seaplane a magnate flew above his field once,
its wings clipped, its fuselage stored after having flown a hundred feet or so.
Sat in repose the brass machinery from the turn of the century
In an antique museum seldomly patronized over the weekdays
where the film strips from a silent theater had been threaded
without a sprocket broken, and the art-nouveau lily-trumpets
Of the Victrolas could play you a song if you only wanted to listen
to muted horns accompany the words mama, home, remember.
You imagine the sorrows those mawkish songs released in their time
because the confidence of the present leaves you cold, so you come
To see how the elders mastered distance, their homesteads sprawling
with cracked-plaster hallways leading to tinier bedrooms or spinets
untuned or deal tables draped with doilies pinned down by Beethoven’s bust.
Their cities on the hill, population migrated to other coasts,
were connected by the cast-iron machinery of this merry-go-round
peeking through the tractors or an ironside’s Pantagruelian engine.