Dispersal

by Richard Tillinghast

           Some impulse comes searching,
sits in a parked car and rolls a smoke,
                         rolls down the window to look at
porches where rocking chairs creaked,
                invisible now,
        iced tea with a sprig of mint,
                      fireflies on summer evenings.

A city block,
        most of its houses demolished.
Now there’s a parking lot, an office block,
and a brick duplex where all were
                 white clapboard with gabled roofs.

A dismantled library.
Someone’s Wuthering Heights from college,
                          its cover distressed,
        turns up on a $1 table somewhere.
A man in Seattle makes coffee and settles down
        in front of a rainy window
with Cathy and Heathcliff ’s story —
        the pages impressed with the unseen imprint
                        of another’s thoughts.

Chipped around the rim and inexpertly glued,
        a delft platter in an estate sale,
                    once part of a dinner service.

Nothing, surely,
                  compared to the fragmentation of an empire,
         the dissolution of its provinces,
small countries now with their own
                         parliaments and currencies,
         the mother tongue devolving into patois and creole.

A little girl looks out at me from a picture frame —
                 silver, 1910 perhaps.
Someone has tied a pretty bow in her hair,
        and they’ve sat her in this impressive chair.
She smiles, but I think she’s unhappy
        now she’s someplace no one can see her,
                 no one who would have known her as a child.
This daughter, this mother, this aunt, this cousin —
                         she’s an orphan now.