Of Small Towns

MAY 1981

BARON WORMSER

OF SMALL TOWNS

It is not so much gossip that absorbs

Them as a fondness, to be found

Even in the children, for measuring lives:

The noting of how many years some wife

Has outlived her husband and how each of the road

Commissioner's four children quit high school

In the middle of the eleventh grade and how

Tt was twenty years to the day (they are

All addicted to anniversaries) that

A black spruce fell on a one-armed man.

Comparison is insistent-the father who

Is a better shot but not as good a card

Player as the son; the sister who

Writes poems while the other two clean house.

Here, people want to live to learn

Who the next President will be, how many

Games the World Series will go, whether

The trains will ever come back.

Ceremonious and dutiful to national symbols

Too many of the sons die in the wars.

The coffins indicate that faraway

Places exist, that you can die quite forcibly

Elsewhere. Those who have hoisted themselves up

And fled will say that the finitude of

Small town life breeds idiocy, that

The imagination turns upon itself, chews

Its substance over and over until it is worse

Than nothing. The surmises which the metropolis loves

To make, the crushes of people whose names you will

Never know, the expansive gestures made

Among incoherent buildings-all that is

Peculiarly urban and self-aware is lacking.

Instead you have a hodgepodge:

Legends hovering, dreams that lapse into

Manias, characters ransacked like cottages

In winter. Each random movement would become

An event. It is no surprise that every now

And then the attentiveness becomes too great

And some hamlet spawns a horror

Of the first degree. As is to be expected-

The émancipé's letters home are blunt:

"You are all like those vile canning jars,

Lidded and sealed and put away for endless winter."

And yet-it is these towns that dignify the slimmest

Of lives with a history, remembering even dogs

With an earnest pleasure, a rush of anecdote and regret.