It was a little poem, as all my poems were
in those days, and just about all I can recall
is it described the thing I saw beyond the seared
hillside we kids had burned last year—plus “winterfall,”
a coinage used to fill my metaphoric bill.
(That other time—another story—the neighbors called
the firehouse. Luckily, not the cops.) The spill
of a thousand fridges, washers, driers appalled,
yet with a frisson: they filled the ravine to the height
of that hill, a hundred feet deep in rotting steel.
It was the early 60s, so every single scrap—dead white.
This was before designers sealed the deal
on planned obsolescence, with that autumnal color
wheel of possibilities: yellow, avocado, copper, tan,
black, and nowadays, brushed steel. So much duller
than that glacier—fiercely white-on-white—fan-
ning out across the hollow, above the stink of Darby
Creek—creek-as-sewer. Can’t recall what I had to say
in that old poem. But now, my poetic hobby-
horse takes its lead from the Bible—hardly au fait,
I know. And I know whited sepulchre’s all too trite.
But, no, I’m thinking of the Old Testament today:
of falling in the ditch you’ve dug. Selling the birthright.
Of hills made low, every valley having its day.
