For the past few years, I've been
going backpacking in Idaho, and to get there,
you have to go through southwest Montana
through the Missoula area south toward the Salmon River
through a little town called Hamilton.
And although that little town is being
ruined like many other little towns
by trailer parks and such things,
it still retains, for me at least,
the kind of nostalgic aura of the '40s.
It's got a very-- once you get off the highway,
you get into a beautiful neighborhood of large houses
and elm trees or whatever they call them, maple trees,
sycamores.
It's a very pretty little place.
It's got a library, it's got all the things
that we don't have anymore.
It has a nice little stone library
with a brook, believe it or not, going through the library
grounds.
The drugstores have the old fashioned canvas awnings
on them.
Good place for nostalgia.
So this is a poem about that little town called Hamilton.
"To be surrounded by so many peaks,
great astounded maidens, and the forests running like happy cows
across the fields, jumping the fences in the town.
Druggists' awnings, a stone library
at the center with a brook, thin asters
leaning on the banks toward suicide in its shadows.
There's any wonder that the divorcees drive
like mad over the freeways from Missoula from Denver
to live among weeds and flimsy trailers by the airport,
to dance with cowboys and electricians of the MSG&E.
Or that leaving, tourists heading
south for the wilderness across the land warping
toward the salmon stop their cars,
get out, stand in wonder in their own short pants
at the rivers, all white, attacking the bridges
beneath the passes rising in mudslides, rubble,
then facile with snow arching into the west
back into the east."