Sample Poems by Eric Trethewey
Green Street
for Trisha
A dirt road once,
paved now—route
into time and the world for some I knew
a lifetime ago. And a tiny house here,
another at the crest of the ridge where someone
bootlegged across the span of those lean years.
The railroad tracks still run beside it
where Dominion Atlantic freights
chuffed and hooted past with the daily news—
always about rhythm rather than arrival,
always about the importance of someplace else.
Thirty years gone and nobody’s here now
but me, nothing more than this
old bundle of longings wrapped up
near the end of another winter,
flurries in the air, wind slapping the hillside
firs and spruces, registering regret
in every heartless key. The shed is still here,
though the privy is gone, and the house
appears abandoned, in spite of an old Dodge
in the yard that might go yet if prompted
the right way. There’s no solace in these places
diminished by time. All the same,
I walk through the field—back of the house,
beside the tracks— through this past that belongs
mostly to others but still sticking to me like burrs.
I’m looking for possibility, new as morning,
the pure sense that things will somehow, at last,
come right in time in this place that some meant
when they said “up home”—a tiny house
where no one seems to live anymore, lives drifted
on the wind like seeds, where lovers, once,
hardly more than children, wrapped the weight
of themselves in each other’s different skins,
and where trains shunted and passed
on rails rocking above time-splintered ties,
where the landscape is drained of color,
denying its vernal place name, where soon
the dry weeds, the circling tangle of alders
will nudge into green one more time
the pale promise of a new season.
Homesteading
Once, driving the
dirt road
that cut straight across the Rawdon hills,
the grade ahead a red slash rising steep
through the afternoon, we stopped
at an old place off to the left.
Maybe this time it would be the right one,
the one he was always looking for
in the newspaper or out along those country
roads—whose ruin he could rectify.
Whose price he could afford.
It was late, just before dusk.
Like a family, three generations of us
gone from home, we bounced up the lane
to the yard where chickens once pecked,
dieseled to a stop by the grayboard house.
There were sheds, a sagging barn,
stony pastures skirted by acres
of blowdown and raspberry tangle.
“Ain’t she a humdinger?” Granddad said,
no more than a sliver of irony in his tone.
Fireflies pulsed in the long grass
around the place as he pointed out
this and that to Nan and Mom, how short
a walk it was to the spring, the file
of alders below the house that told us
there was a stream on the property,
or how he might put running water
in the kitchen. At the very least.
My sisters fussed in the back seat
of that old Ford sedan of his he’d bought
cheap, thoroughly used since ’48.
They were cranky, worn out from holding
onto the hand straps down every back road
in Hants County, through every clutch
of houses with a name—Ardoise, Stanley,
Shubenacadie—learning no more than the landscape
of failure, abandoned farms leaning into hillsides
or settling to earth in a grove of dead elms.
Nothing better to do, I wandered
down to the water, followed its windings
into the trees, picking up stones
from the current to hold the comfort
of smooth edges in my palms, taken in by flashes
of fish, leaves jittery with wind,
what was left of the light.
And then I saw it, a long-legged stillness
in the moving water, neck like a crooked stick,
hunger gleaming in its jeweled eye.
A band of last light flinty on the blackness
spread flat between us, I stood there
watching, wanting only this vigil
above fish or whatever its head
darted down to, once and once again,
this creature that knew what it was looking for
and where to go to find it.
Houses by the Railroad Tracks
after Edward Hopper
From here, I can
see that old house yet—
swag of the roof, faded paint what’s left of white—
a presence preserved in memory. Emblem of another
time, it stands there yet, hill-top high, though squat
to the ground beneath a lowering sky, hopeless as the past.
The railroad ran beside it. Summer and winter
we could tell time by the locomotive’s whistle
for the flag stop and crossing a mile down track
from us, and late at night, Bucephalus from another
world, it highballed through our sleep as nightmare
or something like it—it wasn’t always easy to tell
the difference unless we stood at a window and watched
a fast freight’s mad eyeball rolling white against the sky.
Houses like it (though a sight grander) appear again and again
in the record—in Edward Hopper’s American Landscape,
for instance, or Captain Kelly’s House, or New York,
New Haven and Hartford. And it’s always the same view,
the same story: embankment and tracks in the foreground,
horizontal left to right, dominant above the landscape,
in front of the solitary, mostly-white farmhouses
that sit behind as if sinking into the earth
or history or whatever we are on the other side of.
Cold and ashy pastoral. In House By the Railroad,
Hopper sums it up succinctly in the stark, narrowed focus—
architecture vanquished and reeled in by the road
to the last orbit of urban life. This is what it all
comes down to, that grand idea of home
as permanence, the all-but-forgotten grace
of a spacious century, cut off at the knees
so to speak, by this ribbon of rust and made raw,
ridiculous in its faded, soot-stained paint,
its flagrant, mansard-roofed gesture at grandeur.
Abandoned probably, it’s on the other side
of the tracks now, those who lived here in style once
having carried their memories of home
like a haloed carapace to a suburb someplace else.
Empty the sky around, and the livestock gone,
the landscape gives no trace of bird or tree or bush,
and though you can’t quite see it, you know
what is left of the yard is no more than cinders
and clinkers, and the rest is nothing but light,
like memory, splotched on the side of the house.