Clockwork
We smiled with our diplomas and said I do,
we made love we made war we made children,
the winds blew and the cold came and we lived
in place after place, house after house
where dogs barked, ran loose, died; the television
went from black and white to color, we went
from color to black and white, fading; summer
came, fall, spring, the winters dense with dreams,
vague longing, questions, always questions
and mistakes; children grew the garden grew,
the generations outpaced us as we watched
in awe like the Fourth, gathered holidays to us;
sickness came and went like storms and we read,
paced, cried, raged while years passed, some
easy, some hard, some terrible—the scars hang out
like stars in darkest night.
If time is not absolute then why do our bodies
tick tock down a finite line, the world spin forward
flinging us to the edge where we hold on tight
despite gravity?
The heavens blink, the candle splutters;
we reach for each other, or god, or something.
• • •
Uncanoonuc Hills
Instead of going home after the high school prom
we piled into a car and rode up into the hills
that in daylight form mounds on the horizon,
and that night when the lights from the city
shown to the east so far below us, so far below
that the stars above us hung undiminished
and the Merrimack tumbled through the city
where we could neither see nor hear it,
we remarked on the sleepy houses, silent in the dark
during our ascent, and yelled Wake up Wake up,
the driver striking the horn at each house, the moon
locking the ground in opalescent splendor, the city
and river far below, the empty hilltop where the driver
pulled perpendicular to the abyss so we could watch
the world sleep in a bowl and where we did not sleep
but held on, on through the night saying over
and over Wake up Wake up, all of us laughing,
laughing, and although we would not know it for years,
years so far away that we would no longer recall
all the names attached to the moonlit faces,
when we finally came down we would one day
see the lighted city for what it was,
a mirage on a momentary map, the silent river
a ribbon of forgetting that stole the night,
our innocence, our youth,
and that we were given only
what moved like the river.
• • •
Sylvia Beaupre, a NH native, writes in her childhood home where the past is always present and the natural world absorbed over decades. Her poetry has appeared in a number of literary magazines, including Chautauqua, Spillway, Common Ground and The Comstock Review. She is the author of Tavern Village Tales, an anecdotal history of a New England village.