after the 1758 farmhouse on West Street in Hadley, MA.



I want to get all our friends in the same room!
I want to have them over for dinner!

Sit them down at one big table,
            pass out
            plates.

Each plate would be different!
I’d give our friends wine
and toast and tilapia
kale and beans and guava and eggs
It would be like -
        you know.           One last supper.
And you baked a cake!      Thanks
                    it’ll really
                    sweeten the deal,
we’ll eat it
after dinner.
Maybe for
no reason,

or maybe we’re
another year older.

Blow out the candles!
Wish for a bus!
We’ll put all our friends in
and drive toward the Connecticut River!

On the bus he asks her,
        “What’s the name of that river?”
She forgets. “Oh,” she says, “I used to know the name of this river!

Is it called ‘Connecticut’?
That’s the famous one,
I’ll just say yes.

Freshman year, I took a geology class.
I knew where the mountains were,
made of Holyoke balsalt, or not.
How this all came together. It was like,
a long time ago. You can see where
dinosaurs walked, where the glaciers
scratched the mountains
if you go up to the top.

There you go”, she says,
“I’ve answered your question about
the Connecticut River.”

In the Connecticut River Valley of your dreams
may you always cross the trestle singing to the river
where it hides clay beds and sandbars, singing
to the foothills where the train used to cross
the trestle. And now you are the train,
eyes on the cumulus skyline, and now you
are all-terrain, diving to see
        pebbles and Dr. Pepper
        cans, toothbrushes and
        freshwater plants and
        plastic debris. A skeleton,
        a thresher, a tractor chassis
littering the bottom of the river,
startling the sterling minnows.

Buried in the riverbed beneath
the sandbars, silts and dense
clays sit in bands wrapped
all around the alluvial plain.
Some are sandy and hold
water, and the fine clay layers
remain from ancient winters.

And the river would just love to hold you!
And I would love to have you over for dinner!

The river would just turn you in the current,
try to deposit you in the Atlantic. Kick until
it spits you home for dinner,
back toward the Hadley bridge,

and you fly over farmlands and factories
and meadows stretching out below.
from Norwottuck to Northampton,

from the cornfields to Calvin Coolidge
the river of time eroding
even his presidential visage
        rain after rain,
        drop by drop,
        grain, baby,
        by grain!


Stuck in traffic, on the bus,
the chiseled face of Coolidge
stares back on the bridge,
and time begins to slow
until everything’s held
between the sun’s tresses
and golden oldies
start playing
slow-mo
on every station
on the radio.

Listen: for eternity
there’s just this:
after dinner we drive
the flow of the river
past cows craning necks,
ruffs of hair caked with mud
sticking up from their shoulders.
Over the bridge in Northampton
a man asks teenagers
to pose with his painted car
so he can take their picture
saying, “Stop texting, think
of someone you love and want
to tell. Think of someone you
love and haven’t said ‘I love you’ to, yet.”

For an eternity
that was you!
I wanted to hold you
so I had you over
and over after I had
you over for dinner.

I run at love,
toward you
and know
the most peace
I have known.
For lo, having left
for the world

I return with sonar blips
to ping through your irises.
Knowing to the marrow
I am forever on my own
only improves your cheekbones,
your transparent kiss, your
translucence! Yeah, baby!
Your sheer tenderness!