This Is Just To Say

William Eric
	        Williams, son
of the poet-doctor, was my pediatrician
until I was four and he died.
			       He gave me
a chicken pox shot
		       and a sticker for being brave
while my mother told him she knew
the poem about the plums
			        by heart.
He said
	that wasn’t really a poem,
just a note for his mother. In the blue
house on Ridge Road I was knocking
my heels against history,
			                 oblivious.

I was eating a cherry lollipop and affixing
the sticker to my velvet dress, ruining the feel.
His father hated and loved our town
as much as I would one day.

A very bad environment
			          for poets,
he called it, and that was when we were still
a bit pastoral. I have never seen chickens

none that were living
		            and the only wheelbarrow here
is symbolic, red, chained to a tree outside the library.
We had plums in our yard
			     and crab apples,
until all the trees
		    got brown rot. Not quite
two square miles, a dry town, a blue line
was painted between the yellow on the road
outside the police station.
			   I went to school
with the children of too many cops.
Their houses didn’t grow any flowers
the year after college when
			     I came back
and

               would get drunk across
the railroad tracks where bars were
permitted, go home with men
who’d once starred
		      in school plays.
Backstage
	   I’d silently hand over
the costume changes. Like me, they lived
with parents but had finished
basements, etc.
		On very clear nights
on the porch of the bar, waiting
to get drunk enough to kiss someone,

I could see
	   the moon rising over the stadium
in the distance. It was renamed for an insurance
company, but who wouldn’t rather
				   imagine giants.