Trucks and stationwagons, VWs, old Chevies, Pintos
\ndrive stop-and-go down Whitney Avenue this hot
\nMay day, bluing the coarse air, past graveyard and florist,
\npast this empty brick building covered
\nwith ivy like a Mayan temple,
\nlike a pyramid grown over with jungle vines.
\n\t\t\t\t\t\tI walk around
\nthe building as if I were dreaming it; as if
\nI had left my planet at twenty
\nand wandered a lifetime among galaxies and come home
\nto find my planet aged ten-thousand years,
\nruined, grown over,
\nthe people gone, ruin taking their places….
\n\t\t\t\t\t They
\nhave gone into graveyards, who worked at this loading dock
\nwearing brown uniforms with the pink-and-blue lettering
\nof the Brock-Hall Dairy:
\nFreddie Bauer is dead, who watched over the stockroom;
\nAgnes McSparren is dead, who wrote figures in books
\nat a yellow wooden desk; Harry Bailey is dead,
\nwho tested for bacteria
\nwearing a white coat; Karl Kapp is dead
\nwho loaded his van at dawn,
\nconveyorbelt supplying butter, cottage cheese, heavy cream,
\nB, buttermilk, A with its creamline\u2014
\nand left white bottles at backdoors in North Haven and Hamden
\nfor thirty years; my father is dead
\nand my grandfather.
\n\t\t I stand by the fence at lot\u2019s end
\nwhere the long stable stood\u2014
\nfifty workhorses alive
\nin the suburbs, chestnuts with thick manes, their hooves
\nthe size of oak stumps, that pulled forty thousand quarts
\nthrough mists in the early morning to sleeping doorsteps,
\nuntil new trucks jammed the assembly lines
\nwhen the war ended.
\n\t\t I separate ivy
\nlike long hair over a face
\nto gaze into the room where the bottlewasher
\nstretched its aluminum length like an Airstream trailer.
\nWhen our teacher brought the first grade to the dairy,
\nmen in white caps stacked dirty bottles
\nat the machine\u2019s end, and we heard them clink
\nforty feet to where they rode out shining
\non a belt to another machine
\nthat turned them instantly white, as if someone said a word
\nthat turned them white. I was proud
\nof my father and grandfather,
\nof my last name.
\n\t\t Here is the place
\nthat was lettered with my father\u2019s name,
\nwhere he parked his Oldsmobile in the fifties.
\nI came to a plant with him one summer
\nwhen I was at college, and we walked across blacktop
\nwhere people my age washed trucks;
\nboth of us smiled and looked downwards. That year
\nthe business grossed sixteen million dollars
\nwith four hundred people bottling and delivering milk
\nand Agnes McSparren was boss
\nover thirty women.
\n\t\t At the roof\u2019s edge,
\nthe imperial Roman cement urns
\nflourish and decorate exhausted air.
\nNow suburbs have migrated north
\nleaving Whitneyville behind, with its dead factory
\nbeside a dead movie. They lived in Whitneyville
\nmostly\u2014Freddie Bauer, Agnes McSparren, Karl Kapp,
\nHarry Bailey\u2014who walked their lives
\ninto brick, whose hours turned into milk,
\nwho left their lives inside pitted brick
\nthat disappears beneath ivy
\nfor a thousand years, until the archeologist from a far galaxy
\nchops with his machete….
\n\t\t\t No, no, no…
\nIn a week or a year
\nthe wrecker\u2019s derrick with fifteen-ton cement ball
\non a flatbed trailer
\nwill stop traffic as it squeezes up Whitney Avenue,
\nand brick will collapse, and dump trucks take clean fill
\nfor construction rising from a meadow
\nten miles in the country.
\n\t\t\t I wait
\nfor the traffic to pause, shift, and enter the traffic.<\/p>\n
-Donald Hall<\/em><\/p>\n\n Trucks and stationwagons, VWs, old Chevies, Pintos drive stop-and-go down Whitney Avenue this hot May day, bluing the coarse air, past graveyard and florist, past this empty brick building covered with ivy like a Mayan temple, like a pyramid grown over with jungle vines. I walk around the building as if I were dreaming it; […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2341,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3928"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2341"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3928"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3928\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3929,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3928\/revisions\/3929"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}