28 December, Fresh-Air Dryers

It’s more routine than rut for it’s meant

to frame out the shapeless days confined

to quarters, mostly.  So off I go again on

my morning walk through streets of factories

gone but for memory; some still standing

are those put to other uses like apartments,

or still left to squat moldering in blackened

brick, their window panes unreflecting or

missing like the eye-orbit vacancy of a dug-

up skull.  I move on to rows of multi-family

homes on Liberty Street, much like the ones

once blocks away serving as through-stations

for my grandparents and siblings from Ireland.

I gaze up at a second-floor clotheslines on Hobart,

the rusted pulleys, the rope the only new thing

added after years so many. Now we have other

newcomers to welcome, so many with darker

skin and another ring to their voices, who tether

“fresh-air dryers” across back landings and

balconies – America changing as always meant

to be, as who we are.  Old avuncular trees,

planted in times when clanging trolleys rumbled

down streets – like chestnut, oak, beech and

the few surviving elm – once giving shade relief

to bricklayers, street vendors on their hurried lunch

in the summer swelter. Walking up East Main I see

a large once handsome American Beech without its

sky reach, now stacked up in cut sections on the lawn.

Sad, I think, and the mournful train horn seems to

agree as I turn on Pearl and pass a balsam fir laid down

curb-side, stripped of Christmas glitz, its apex an arrow

pointing to the laundromat on Liberty, where a few folk

wait their cue to take out their laundry load.  Heavy rains

washed out a foot of snow, uncovering litter underneath –

fast-food cups, cigar wrappers and a child’s asthma inhaler

on Charles – the inhaler taking me to idle musings of

a young mother beside herself over her child’s lost asthma

rescuer, costly, and hating to call her aunt again to lend her

money to replace it. So trivial for some, so critical for others.