My Town

Like an an old person with some major surgery,
Belpre has its small areas of clotted memory
continuing, in the humdrum way,
the habits of its formative years.

Graceful homes by the river
are kept up and re-painted.
Blocks here and there harbor stately maples and walnuts.
Old homes, some kept up, some in disarray
line the street grid.
The avenues are now either thoroughfare or residential.
But it’s still quiet,
as if setting in a spell,
with one hundred miles of forest
between here and any metropolis.

At times I just set on my front porch and murmur
“one hundred miles of trees,”
as the sun sets through them.

The post My Town appeared first on Clutch MOV.

Harmar Tavern

Years ago, the old fellow from the worm shop nearby
would shuffle in for his afternoon beer to escape the heat.
He’d rest his cane and in the cool, inner twilight,
I could hear the coins chatter on the bar top.
He used to work for my mother in law’s, mother’s, third husband’s
engineering firm called, “Dig it, Ditch it & Dam it.”

The mugs were brought out freezer cold
and the beers served with a thick skein of ice on their sides.
Jars of homemade horseradish sat for sale on a front corner table.
And the fried bologna sandwich was still “Almost Famous”
and came with a side.

Fellows would sit in the quiet bar in the mid-afternoon,
which stood halfway down a brick, tree-lined
neighborhood of narrow working-class homes,
with the Union Headquarters just up the street,
and a guy selling farm produce from the back of a truck
parked a block or so away
where the crossroads met before the bridge
across the Muskingham into Marietta.

I enjoyed my first fried bologna sandwich here
and haven’t ordered anything else, since.
You sit back and watch the TV and barmaids;
meet with friends.
Currently, one barmaid has a circular maze tattoo
on her right outer thigh.
To struggle with it over five seconds
would be considered leering,
so I’m toying with the idea of taking a photo
and solving the problem at home.

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Marietta Home Tour

Who would have imagined such culture and beauty

behind the façade of Appalachia?

Regal, slender, grey-haired matrons glide through homes

of original rooms with ten-foot ceilings of original plasterwork relief,

original iron fireplaces, original heavy pocket doors, arched windows, inlaid floors,

spiraling staircases and then on back to the remodeled kitchen and den,

blazing with light and color, cooking islands, and built-ins, flat screen TVs, gas ranges

and subzero refrigerators and then out onto the screened-in, bright, airy patio

overlooking a spacious backyard with a 150-year-old oak, a hanging swing

and carefully tended gardens, all quiet and tranquil on an avenue

that is brick and broad and tree-lined with branches that interlock overhead.

Then, of course, across the street

the scrawny homeowner with his shirt off,

waist length white beard and ponytail

is mowing his small patch of lawn

with a sputtering machine

on a  humid afternoon.

Even in the towns, it’s ridges and hollers,

ridges and hollers,

ridges and hollers…

like the refrain of an old fiddle tune

reverberating back generations.

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Wife Poem #62 / Dave Childers and The Carpenter Ants!

Last night we listened to
Dave Childers and The Carpenter Ants!
wail it in a deserted conference room
of a shuttered fifties era department store
in Parkersburg, West Virginia.
for ten bucks a head.

“Blood on the ceiling!”
“Blood on the walls!”
We chortled along with Dave
in a song about a double tavern killing
a couple counties away.

Then, “Run! Skeleton run!”
about a wife murderer
hunted down and buried on a ridge.
From time to time he’d rise from his grave
to head downhill into town.
Year after year, he continued
until eventually all that was left of him
was a skeleton.
The townsfolk would say,
“Go home, Bill.”

My wife usually does not burst into song.
But her eyes sparkled as we yodeled the chorus,
like squirrel tails waving
from bicycle handle bars.

At evening’s end, Dave thanked us for
“getting’ off your couches
to come down and listen.”

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Devouring Cold Watermelon in This Anonymous River Town

Big, oblong, and mottled green,

flat and faded yellow on the bottom

where they’ve sat in the field, heavy with promise –

they wobble in the back on the drive home

and respond with a ripe ‘crack’ as they’re sliced open.

You can eat a car trunk full of all that water and fiber;

fill up for a few calories and practice wild gluttony.

The land never felt so generous as you gaze across those green orbs

in a hazy summer field  wavering in the sun.

And as the juice dribbles from your lips onto the thirsty soil,

you know it’s true that only a fool

would pass by this area’s fine, vine ripened produce.

In a river bottom town,

half a watermelon should sit in the fridge

nearby a dozen cold beers, or you simply

do not have the supplies to be neighborly.

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