Home Town

April 28 2017

The local paper

in my home town

is good for the ads,

and did for the puppy

when she learned not to pee on the floor.

It has all the scores

from high school.

Saturday's yard sales,

the worthy mayor's

speech to Rotary,

pictures of men

leaning on their shovels

around a half-filled pothole.

That is

all we really care to know.

And inside the back page, below the fold

some wire-service stories

about great affairs of state,

consequential men

somewhere else.

But by then

your hands are smudged with ink

and you just want to toss the thing,

flimsy paper

that could use more gloss and bleach.

Except we'd shake our heads at the waste,

and who would ever be willing to pay,

and anyway

it's always been like this.

But only after clipping out the piece

about your great aunt's big day.

Who will turn 90 next week;

and, as the story crows,

has lived her whole life

in her childhood home.

Or so far, at least.

I still read the big city paper. And now the digital edition; so it's not even a “paper”. But when the car was in the shop the other day, I picked up the complimentary copy of the local daily, and it reinforced how disconnected I am: in the media universe that comes to me over the airwaves, I could be living anywhere ...or nowhere. But mostly, I noticed how thin it was, and how provincial.

The real impetus for this poem came from a New Yorker article (A Long Homecoming – May 1 2017; by Ariel Levy) about the author Elizabeth Strout. She wrote Olive Kitteridge, a memorable character who embodies all the flinty repression of coastal Maine: I never read the book, but loved the serialized version on HBO.

As the subtitle of the article says, “The novelist Elizabeth Strout left Maine, but it didn't leave her.” It was this complicated interplay of attraction and repulsion, of belonging and ambition – ambivalence about notions of home; the contrast between “perching” and feeling rooted; the push/pull of claustrophobia and comfort; the pinched conformity of both tradition and expectation rubbing up against the restlessness of youth – that made me want to write about small town life. Except that would be an essay, or another novel. I'm too impatient and too susceptible to instant gratification for that. Hence, poetry: a modest poem about just one thing. I think this poem is as much encomium as gentle criticism: that there is nothing wrong with daily life, bourgeois values, the comfort of home; or doing what you can in the real world you actually know and touch.

I know I will be reprimanded for saying consequential men instead of people. I went back and forth, and only settled on the sexist version because of the sound. Although it could be argued that this works here because it reflects the patriarchal view of small towns and older people. It also calls back to the 2^nd stanza, where the most consequential thing the local men do is manual labour.

I like the mischief of the last line. The misinterpretation of “having lived one's whole life” is a lame old one-liner. But it also hints at a restless undercurrent of escape. And even more, it shares a joke with the reader about the improbable prospect of change, at a life just beginning at 90!