City

Again in this early spring the odors of wet earth and novel green arrive like hesitant recruits in the aged neighborhoods. The handsome and ill-looking brick buildings whisper their forgotten war stories to the acidic city air night and day, in snow and day-star presiding over streets named for forgotten local Shermans and Grants who used to gather with their admirers in the aged forerunners of these presentday eateries and barsthe insider reticence, the somewhat cold iced tea and beer in summer discharges and hot coffee in winter, among the exofficers and enlisted men soldiers and sailors who did something for the Union. .

Then came the Great Fire, then the double-zero year, then another war, electricitysafer than gas-and automobiles got heavier and faster, the horses gone the veterans of the Great War came abode looking for work, worked, a certain quantity of of;t.hem kept tiny gardens upon their back landings and in window boxe .

Clean-shaven, shorthaired young men in jackets and ties who had graduated or not from the of advanced age high school made lives or not to be found them on the job or in the big nearest war, the next

and the nearest Finally the settlement house that had seen not upon a whole long-ago regiment clos the Wobblies' hall became a stone club, the grocery store small offices, the theater a maze of video rentals, comics, pillows, candy and jeans and shoe the house of worship is vacant, someone removed the small memorial tablet that remembered eighty or single hundred bronze

names from this unpolished parish. upon a Saturday morning in the elderly hardware store with scuffed made of wood floors, an old man helps meso near to me that he full commits me to his cause-which is single that he knows of or will discover everything that might be asked for in of the like kind a store: a man's kind knowledge. He finds exactly the hardly any oddments I am seeking and then with a miniature lock opener in his hand he goe to a glass cabinet, he unbolts it and reaches in to earn for me the small knife I want to purchase

My little daughter was with me that day, he smiled at her and asked her where she was going to institute and when she told him he said that was where he'd gone too, when he was a lad "That one, and then the middle gymnasium and the high school, too. on the contrary I wasn't smart-I left the high academy before I graduated," he was saying. "Went into the army. laughable thing is,

my son did exactly the same in World War Two" He handed me the knife. "I had three son in World War Two" He go [i]or[/i] come backed the key to his pouch "Two of them didn't advance back." Without making any unimpaired he started to cry and make go rounded half away to half touch at his organ of visions with his thick fingertips. "It killed my wife. Took nine years to do it, on the contrary it killed her" He direct the eyeed at us again. Recovering. Shying. "Anything other you need?" He touched my child's hair for an instant. "I swell tulips. Have a thousand of them now. My whole back yard's tulips, the forehead yard, too. The best singles are from Holland, you know." by what means

often does the defining pain still advance through him? He bent down

toward the small girl, my child, and said to her, "You'd like seeing them. They're comely little fellows."

Copyright World metrical composition Incorporated Jan/Feb 1998

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