A Town Called.....

 

Sometimes I wish I was living in a crossroads town,

less than really, a bar, a grocery store, a water tower,

far away from any place of consequence. Here heat is a cube,

in summer; people are encased in it, flies in amber.

You walk outside to look at the day, then retreat inside again;

time is irrelevant; all day is heat, every hour the same

till night comes. Nothing of note has happened since the sixties:

a fire that gathered the population together for six hours,

smoked for a day or two, then went out;

that old shop’s still there like a rotten tooth.

There’s no traffic to speak of, the wires come in on high poles,

the line of them, askew in places; you see them into the distance;

there’s nothing on the landscape to obscure the view;

turn your head, ditto in the opposite direction.

When a wind gets up, it lifts the dust, everywhere’s covered;

the view through a window gives a grey tone to the landscape,

but that’s fine, dust is part of the appeal.

People are old; they grew old while they were still young;

it is their way of dealing with the heat and emptiness; their faces

are parched soil with bright eyes embedded, and they’re gentle.

Time has stopped in my town; there’s no one racing with it,

there’s no point; that’s the way I like it.