"Old Roadside Resorts" by Molly Peacock
Old Roadside Resorts
by Molly Peacock
Summer is a chartreuse hell in the mountains,
green after green after green, the wet smell
of possibility in everything. "Doubt him?"
a memory of a friend's voice asks. Yes! "Well,
why do you love a man who's in a tangle
you yourself would never be in?" So I am,
the hypotenuse of a triangle
watching the other two sides in a jam
of history and pain and veils, like veils
of green washing over the mountain spines
on which perch the broken-down summer jails,
pale boxes that housed Chasidim in the pines
years ago. They're richer now, and go elsewhere.
So mice, squirrels, spiders, and raccoons stay there.
The mountains are like the backs of friendly
dinosaurs who, if they heaved in their sleep,
would throw a small car all the way gently
to Syracuse. Moist follicular trees weep
and chatter. I used to be married, goddamn.
Like him, I was in the tangle I'll never be in.
From the third side I had to see the sham,
the last side, the last window to see in.
Inside stolen time and through time's arches
are these places, webbed and dusty now,
mosquitoes humming among the old porches,
overgrown, sloping, askew. They are endowed,
the gnaw-footed dreams of animals' lairs,
with the vacant stateliness of claw-footed chairs.
by Molly Peacock
Summer is a chartreuse hell in the mountains,
green after green after green, the wet smell
of possibility in everything. "Doubt him?"
a memory of a friend's voice asks. Yes! "Well,
why do you love a man who's in a tangle
you yourself would never be in?" So I am,
the hypotenuse of a triangle
watching the other two sides in a jam
of history and pain and veils, like veils
of green washing over the mountain spines
on which perch the broken-down summer jails,
pale boxes that housed Chasidim in the pines
years ago. They're richer now, and go elsewhere.
So mice, squirrels, spiders, and raccoons stay there.
The mountains are like the backs of friendly
dinosaurs who, if they heaved in their sleep,
would throw a small car all the way gently
to Syracuse. Moist follicular trees weep
and chatter. I used to be married, goddamn.
Like him, I was in the tangle I'll never be in.
From the third side I had to see the sham,
the last side, the last window to see in.
Inside stolen time and through time's arches
are these places, webbed and dusty now,
mosquitoes humming among the old porches,
overgrown, sloping, askew. They are endowed,
the gnaw-footed dreams of animals' lairs,
with the vacant stateliness of claw-footed chairs.