Off Route 27
So the rainwater in a strip mall
parking lot could run off unimpeded
down a concrete ditch, beyond
the old, abandoned tannery, then
who knows where, men in neon
orange-yellow dug, piled, pushed,
erased a modest marsh of cattails
& bulrush where, as kids, we’d wait
for spring—those first few tentative
peepers whistling & then the chorus
expanding as light dipped below
the tree line. We knew in coming days,
there’d be painted turtles sunning
& the songs of red-winged blackbirds.
Even now, there are certain warm
March evenings when I start to think
I hear jingling, somewhere past the mall,
past the duplexes where Rice’s Orchard
used to stand, almost like high-pitched bells
in the distance. Those small frogs, I convince
myself, must be calling to their mates out there,
maybe out where Old Man Rice once took me:
a vernal pool set deep in his woods. He’d said,
This is the best place to find first life in spring.
Adding, Come back should you need it.
Richard Jordan’s poems appear or are forthcoming in Southern Poetry Review, Rattle, Cider Press Review, Connecticut River Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, Gargoyle Magazine, Tar River Poetry, South Florida Poetry Journal and elsewhere. His debut chapbook, The Squannacook at Dawn, won first place in the 2023 Poetry Box Chapbook Contest. He serves as an associate editor for Thimble Literary Magazine.
Header photo by Georgii Shipin, courtesy Shutterstock.
