Already in 1927

Summer night in quiet level suburban streets, 
lights still on in two out of three houses, 
five small green lights edge the driveway 
of a brick house two doors down, cold lights 
in the warm dark air … Hundreds of lives 
within three blocks-persons who look away—
and this is only one modest suburb 
in North Carolina or Connecticut. Too many: 
persons who are looking away. From you.

But what about 1927? Then too 
lamps burned in thousands of windows 
within a few miles, and were seen 
through the thick of summer night meaning 
lives, averted, oblivious, unreachable; 
a boy and a girl said goodnight at the door

and from her window she watched him walk away 
into the ripe darkness of June 1927. She felt 
his steps leading to a city job and other girls, 
girls with expensive hats. She felt 
so small, lost and so small …
She sat on her bed for twenty minutes—
then she tied a paisley kerchief in her hair 
and washed her face and read a novel by Hardy 
and grew up and married a partly good man.

She survived the infinity of 1927: 
since already in 1927 the problem was 
present with all ingredients, the steps fading, 
lamplight cold in the warm air on this block 
and the next block … So 
it's an old condition. The liquid darkness 
and voices from the far side of the playground, 
newspaper on the davenport filled 
with unromantic activity, what Coolidge said 
about aid to farmers; already in 1927

you had to pass through squares of darkness 
and small circles of yellow light alone. 
My father, for instance, was thirteen: 
he shut the back door and climbed the creaky stairs, 
making plans.