Poems From Providence - The Poet's Press

I played here as a child, amid the thorns
And poison ivy. The earth did not open
to swallow me. Perhaps I am immune,
the one, who remembering, belongs.
There is not much left of the great coke industry,
when the coal was eked from nearby Hecla
and the smouldering coke went to Pittsburgh.
A quarter mile back, the red rust scavenges
the twisted wheel of a coal crusher,
its chute and trestle and engine works gone;
it lays like the useless jaw of a dinosaur.
Open hearth ovens sprout vengeful trees,
vine roots split mortar, firebrick moults clay.
“I lived here many years ago,” I said —
not saying how many. It was thirty —
I was five when this house protected me,
when its terrors wrote themselves upon me.
And so the hungry past steals up behind me,
a lumbering truck full of fossils,
heating my poems to the red fury of ovens,
erasing my life as quickly as I write it.
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