The title poem from my collection, “The Other Village” uses Potsdam’s Bayside Cemetery as a stand-in for the Potsdam I grew up in. All the characters from my childhood: teachers, grocers, barbers, neighbors, paper route customers. I could find all their names among the stones.
I was back in Bayside yesterday for the inurnment ceremony for an old friend, Steve Easter. Now Bayside is becoming home to my friends and contemporaries and it’s causing me to look at it with a different eye.
The “other village” reconsidered
It used to be that the “other village”
was reserved for my father’s generation,
parents of friends, older acquaintances
from this sleepy college town on the river.
Art and Mary Ellen were family friends,
George and Anne just downstream, too.
But they were old as well, seemed old
to me even in the days of childhood.
Since you and I have given up on Plan A –
living forever — and have made our wills,
we walk these paths with a different eye,
looking not for names, but for a shady plot.
As more of our own flock here along the water
under the flaming maples, I hear their voices
echoed in peregrinating geese marshaled
among the islets of the river’s impoundment.
Julie was a few years younger than us, young
enough to give one pause. Today it’s Steven,
just a few years older. It’ll be homier, I suppose,
to already know who our neighbors will be.
But now we must walk these trails in their stead,
stopping by from time to time to share gossip,
must paddle the backwater, drive the backroads,
leaf-peeping. We must hasten to love the world.
I pick up my guitar and play “Who Knows Where
the Time Goes” and “I’ll Fly Away.” I play “Now
the Green Blade Rises” and “Winter’s Come
and Gone,” I pick my way through “Urge for Going.”
I’m sorry that they are missing this cool sunshine,
this lambent October which capstones the year.
I will miss it too, just as I will miss you, and them.
In the meantime, I will see you all in dreamtime.
