Staying in the same book, but moving to another place
entirely, I'm going to read a poem called "Traffic."
When I was a kid, I spent all my summers at the farm,
hanging with my grandfather.
But I didn't live there in the winter.
It was my mother's place, where she'd come from.
I spent my winters in Connecticut.
And it was a family business, a big dairy,
the other side of the farm, a dairy that
bought raw milk from farmers, processed it, and delivered it.
It was the Brock-Hall Dairy in Hamlin Connecticut.
I've always wanted to be able to write more about that,
but also to write about--
I still would like to write more about business.
I write so many pastoral poems.
I love to, I love the country, but the business of America
is business, as our great President Coolidge said.
[LAUGHTER]
There is so much of this that was in my background,
that I know about, that I've written about so seldom, so
rarely.
Well, this was an attempt to do that.
I had to write it many, many times.
And when I first wrote it, I tried
to have it full of phrases, like accounts receivable and so on.
[LAUGHTER]
And I couldn't pull it off.
I mean, I so wish the hell I could.
But it is, at any rate, on that subject.
I think everything in it is--
I've told you the place and the place names that
belong to that place and so on.
"Traffic."
Trucks and station wagons, VWs, old Chevys,
Pintos drive stop and go down Whitney Avenue this hot May
day, bluing the course air, past graveyard and florist,
past this empty brick building covered with ivy
like a Mayan temple, like a pyramid grown over
with jungle vines.
I walk around the building as if I
were dreaming it, as if I had left my planet at 20
and wandered a lifetime among galaxies,
and come home to find my planet aged 10,000 years,
ruined, grown over, the people gone, ruin taking their places.
They have gone into graveyards, who worked at this loading
dock, wearing brown uniforms with the pink and blue
lettering of the Brock-Hall dairy.
Freddie Bauer is dead, who watched over the stockroom.
Agnes McSparren is dead, who wrote figures in books
at a yellow wooden desk.
Harry Bailey is dead, who tested for bacteria,
wearing a white coat.
Carl Capp is dead, who loaded his van
at dawn, conveyor belt supplying butter, cottage
cheese, heavy cream, B, buttermilk,
A with its cream line, and left white bottles
at back doors in North Haven and Hamden for 30 years.
My father is dead, and my grandfather.
I stand by the fence at lot's end,
where the long stables stood, 50 workhorses alive
in the suburbs, chestnuts with thick manes, their hooves
the size of oak stumps that pull 40,000 quarts
through mists in the early morning to sleeping doorsteps
until new trucks jammed the assembly lines,
when the war ended.
I separate ivy, like long hair over a face,
to gaze into the room where the bottle washer stretched
its aluminum length like an Airstream trailer.
When our teacher brought the first grade to the dairy,
men in white caps stacked dirty bottles at the machine's end.
And we heard them clink 40 feet to where they rode out shining
on a belt to another machine that turned them instantly
white, as if someone said a word that turned them white.
I was proud of my father and grandfather, of my last name.
Here is the place that was lettered
with my father's name, where he parked
his Oldsmobile in the '50s.
I came to the plant with him one summer, when I was at college,
and we walked across blacktop where people
my age washed trucks.
Both of us smiled and looked downwards.
That year, the business grossed $16 million,
with 400 people bottling and delivering milk.
And Agnes McSparren was boss over 30 women.
At the roof's edge, imperial Roman cement urns
flourish and decorate exhausted air.
Now suburbs have migrated north, leaving Whitneyville
behind with its dead factory beside a dead movie.
They lived in Whitneyville mostly,
Freddy Bauer, Agnes McSparren, Carl Capp, Harry Bailey,
who walks to their lives into brick, whose hours turned
into milk, who left their lives inside pitted brick that
disappears beneath ivy for 1,000 years,
until the archaeologists from a far
galaxy chops with his machete.
No, no, no, no.
In a week or a year, the wreckers,
Derek with a 15-ton cement ball on a flatbed trailer,
will stop traffic as it squeezes up Whitney Avenue.
And brick will collapse.
And dump trucks take clean fill for construction
rising from a meadow 10 miles in the country.
I wait for the traffic to pause, shift, and enter the traffic.
At one point in--
[APPLAUSE]
At one point in writing it, I had a long passage
about how supermarkets, loss leaders,
supermarket-made plastic gallons, loss leaders.
And this is why the business failed and so on.
I found I couldn't handle all that material.
So I made, perhaps, a different kind
of poem out of it, probably more like my other poems.