Westfield, Massachusetts
by Amy Miller
Sooty red-brick town,
noonday chimney smoke,
a fire in cold fingers.
Even the snow
is gone to the sunken
bottommarsh of Crane Pond,
to the migrant watertips
of icicles off Granville Gorge.
What would I do here?
Paint ladies’ nails
in a gas-hot shop
out back of the mill?
Marry the man
who owns the Tool & Die,
loan my stepsons money,
write letters in the kitchen
long past the TV’s last breath?
This bristle-backed town,
this crazy little paradise,
wants my life.
It calls me to the ice’s edge,
covers me in sleet, tells me
what it could do:
set me down in a sleepy house
with the front porch falling in,
the dog dreaming on the rug.
It says I’ll have to find
my own damned way
to make a living, my own
damned way home if
I have one. It says
I can stay here for a price.
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Amy Miller is a production editor at Backbeat Books in San Francisco. She notes: “I wrote this poem on a plane coming back from my 25th high-school reunion, feeling—as always—as if I’d been physically torn from the town I used to live in. I think about Westfield when I’m dissatisfied; it’s my snow globe. Having grown up in two disparate places—northern California and western New England—I continually struggle with the concept of ‘home.’” E-mail: amymca@earthlink.net |