This wasn't the writing I dreamed of
Writing, but it was the writing I wrote.
My mother, a New Englander, half-orphan,
Raised on an inadequate subsistence farm
During the Great Depression while
Her oldest brothers dropped out of school
To find work in the dwindling timber,
Understandably swore by her family's
Quasi-Calvinist form of Evangelism
For eighty-odd years, despite a deep,
Natural, skeptical streak about everything
Other than the KJV. They saved their own
Lives, those family members, true believers,
And that could not be questioned. When
She married the dissolute, crippled son
Of a descendant of the first Dutch settlers,
Down in what became New Jersey,
She converted him and kept a tense
Distance from the socially inclined
Dutch Reformed church of his mother.
When she gave birth to her first-born,
In her mid-thirties, a nurse herself, it was
In the memorial hospital located
Directly across the street from the Dutch
Reformed Church of Pompton Plains,
A building itself nearly two centuries old
And sprouted from a land purchase made
By her husband's ancestors another
Century or so before that. The landscape
Around the highways and subdivisions,
Dying factories and scraps of old farms
There, like the landscape around her
Childhood, remained strewn with toponyms
Left over from the indigenes her husband's
And her own ancestors had fought with,
Bargained with, converted and exploited:
Ramapo, Pequannock, Pompton, so on.
So I grew up in the most banal of American
States, thinking it was a unique, local trait.
But I'll tell you, if you promise to keep
Reading: everything is nothing much;
Everything is equally banal and boring
Or not, at the time of its experiencing. There
Were Lenape, distant relations of the Seneca
That would later interweave their dwindling
Opportunities with my mother's missionary
Forebears further north, who walked around
These old parts where their language would
Remain like Borges' scraps of rotten maps,
Outliving their world's collapse. For them,
An ordinary day before the Ryersons came
With wampum from New Amsterdam, before
Even the earliest sailing ships of scurvy
Reconnoitered the coast a long walk away,
Its sun and its birdsong, its green springs
Were as ordinary as they'd ever been
And one wondered rather about one's own
Fortunes in that context, one's offspring,
Without likely thinking, This is so romantic!
One day all these woods and all my tribe
And all my offspring will be gone, no
Matter what I think on today while I repair
Familiar weirs along this same old stream.
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