DURHAM FAIR

The bus squeals to a stop and the two kids
Throw themselves over the wall book bags and all.
A low sun makes long shadows on the grass in front of them
And the little row of sugar maples start to turn.
On the Boston Road past Albany we stop at an old tavern
That still serves beef and popovers in a basket.

In early days coaches sound a warning from the top
Of the hill. Rooms are papered and added on as needed.
Each has exposed beams and a walled over door or fireplace.
Couples are alone and silent or together in conversation.
This season our weather's ahead of theirs.  Too late to make it
We stay at a motel run by a dark man with an accent.

We find him at the kitchen table with the paper.
He eats his meals out and waits till we get there
For breakfast together with good coffee.
She's been gone six years with blood cancer and he lives
In the empty family room on the couch with a bad TV.
The kids watch a morning talk show with green faces.

In revolt from a welloff family of engineers
He goes to the state agricultural college
And marries the farmer's daughter.  They meet
In the Grange booth cooking hamburger at a county fair.
She's tall and a redhead just eighteen.
They wait during the war and write letters.

Hers follow him all over the West Pacific
And he sends back whenever the fighting stops.
It's the only chance they ever get to talk to one another.
He makes it through to finish his tour at Portsmouth
And his Dad gives him the foreman's house with the 60-acre lot
Above the woollen mill to start a farm.

Fridays he takes the kids with him in the old truck
To the market in Hartford. They camp overnight
With school chums at the log cabin in the cedar thicket.
A black snake lives under the chicken coop for years
And the brook fills with watercress. When eggs fail
He drives bus and puts it all in Christmas trees.

The fair gets bigger and more crowded every year.
This is the 75th and we drive to the Industrial Park
At a muddy field where they shuttle us in a steady stream.
All kinds of people come from far away as Springfield
And New Haven and we don't see anyone we know.
He stays away helping out in the apple orchard.

He takes us all to dinner at the regular place.
They build it by the river with insurance money
On an ancient site and we look down the pocket for the wheel.
Since service days his speech is peppery and he chain smokes
Through the old jokes and stories and kids with the owner
And the waitress who's young with a pink face.

In the only part of his life he can recall with energy
And conviction he's detached with two platoons
In the desolate middle of the New Guinea jungle and beach.
His unit never makes the expected engagement and he survives
The fifty years on field rations and fish from a tidal lagoon
Well dug in camouflaged with a good line of fire on all sides.

On the highway going North colors brighten
As we get closer home. Maple on the hillsides
First begin to lose them at the top and outer branches.     
Birch and apple slip from green to yellow with time.
Individuals stressed by disease or drought go bare.
Brittle leaves on beech and oak live into winter.

Middletown CT 9/29/94