Diminuendo

By: Sarah Paley

Do you think much has changed since then?

The mile markers are still there.

In photos they look like plain white

head stones – anonymous – like a battlefield in France.

The barn is unrecognizable – rehabilitated.

Chicken coops are long gone they

were always an eye-sore, a problem.

Jumping from coop to coop

the jagged edge of the tin roof

tore your leg from ankle to thigh.

They wrapped you in newspaper

as if you were a fish. You lay in the back --

in the front, behind the wheel -- was it Mr. Loeb?

I didn’t know if you’d come back

for certain. It was an emergency!

Everyone panicked and ran to and fro.

I stood stock still under the giant elm

and watched – like an alien sending out a probe.

Readers, at this point, will want some reassurance. Want

to know the outcome for better or worse.

I would too. It’s good to feel sure about things --

you can feel secure like hugging yourself in a flannel robe.

Remember the detritus along the shores of the Mohawk?

Those scary black sacs that look like little men in distress, limbs akimbo, screaming for help? Or a water chestnut? Spiky painful orb.

Ouch. Everything was terrifying back then.

But we all seem to remember it differently or

Maybe, it’s just me. I can’t seem to get past point A to get to point B.

---

Sarah Paley is a writer who lives in NYC. Her poems have been published in Agni, Raritan, Barrow Street, Phantom Drift and other journals. Her prose writing (humor and essays) can be found in THE NEW YORKER. This poem is written in a form invented by the late great poet Robert Harris. The form is called The Diminuendo and the rules are as follows: The last word of the first stanza determines the number of lines in that stanza. The word then “diminishes” and continues to determine the length of all future stanzas.