It Was Not Supposed to Be That Way

by Brett Rutherford

It was not supposed to be that way.
The trees I grew up with are gone:
lightning struck one, another succumbed
to fungus rot, another removed
when the lead pipes were replaced.
I found the school at Hecla a ruin,
and finally, an empty lot. Iron plates
now cover the coal mine opening
where we watched the miners descend
into their daily hell from our desks.
The school at Kingview all boarded up
no longer has that playground
the bullies dominated; the store
to which I ran for penny candy is gone.
The middle school is an empty lot,
ditto my high school, not even a piece
of chalk to remember it by.

We knew we outlive the aged among us;
great-grandparents certainly, the ones
we had to shout at to be heard, whose
rocking chairs are rent to splinters, who,
cremated, may not even have graves
you can visit. Then one by one
the teachers retired and died, until
the last of them is gone. They heard
the first French words you sounded out,
explained the Greeks’ geometry,
and lit your way with Scott and Shakespeare.

Now every ramshackle house
we lived in has been demolished:
the big brick house aslant
the slag heaps of the mines and ovens,
the sagging little houses
     on Kingview Road,
          Mulberry Street,
          North Main — vanished!

It was not supposed to be that way.
If elders had prevailed, the draft
would have taken me. I would not
have defied it and fled to New York.
The trees would remember me, then,
and plaques in my name would adorn
the hall of every school I attended.
My bones would come to light in Hanoi,
and come home in a military transit.
Someone would hold dear the folded flag
that gathered dust on the mantel;
perhaps the house with its one gold star
would not have been demolished.

I went instead to San Francisco, came back
and earned me my own FBI file
for my underground urges. Like Walt,
I reveled in Manhattan’s orgies.

I frequented the opera. I lived.
The trees, the schools,
    the houses demolished behind me
one by one, fall in my shadow.
Poets became my family,
     musicians my friends.
Nothing I did
    was the way it was supposed to be.
Treeless, homeless, orphaned, proud.