“MILL HOUSING” and “ROADSIDE POND”

By Mark Belair

MILL HOUSING

His was a broken-down rental

where our street’s dead end

met the mill’s chain-link fence, a house

notorious for its sequence of

broken-down tenants.

Mine was built the same,

but kept as a tidy two-family affair

at the other end of the street, where

it opened out

to our small Maine town.

His was an inattentive mom

who let him run wild in dirty clothes

and eat alone on the porch—cold

grub he scrounged from a kitchen

in which she never cooked.

Mine was attentive, hung fresh laundry,

had pots steaming and pans sizzling

for our family dinner, one we shared

with my grandparents, who came up

from downstairs.

The boy and I never spoke.

We just observed each other from a distance.

I envied his freedom: Nobody cared

what he said, where he went, what he did.

He envied my care: He’d always stop

to watch my mom when she called me in.

Then his mom was arrested and incarcerated,

and he was confined to reform school.

Then we moved to a mill-free town in which

my mom—within bounds—let me run free.

Though I kept the habit of obedience

when she called me in.

And kept the habit

of dreaming

of the disobedient boy’s

daring reform school escape.

____

ROADSIDE POND

A small, ruffling pond

borders a highway, traffic speeding

past it, no houses near it, no paths

to it since marshland encircles

the rest of it.

It stands, for all the hurly-burly

beside it, in primitive seclusion,

host to underwater life

spawning and growing

in isolation, the pond—

unwatched, untouched, unchecked—

the hermetical haunt, beneath

its sluggish surface, for emergent strains

of strangeness.

---