Dawn Potter: Concord Street Hymn

Elaine is standing on her stoop with her doddering
chow Teddy, and I am trying to decide if I
can pretend I don’t see her. Elaine has a shout 
like a blue jay’s and she specializes
in the unanswerable. “Dawn!” she hollers now, “I can’t
recognize you if you’re not wearing a hat!”
Meekly I halt and admire her daffodils.
“I dug them up by mistake,” she barks.
“Now I don’t have a-one.”
 
Next door, at LBRSTMN’s ranch house,
there is no shouting. The license plate on his pickup
is the only information available. Otherwise: shades
drawn tight, a note to the mailman taped to the door,
a needle on the front sidewalk, and daffodils
bobbing along the foundation:
yes, there will be
 
daffodils in every stanza of this poem
because it is spring in Maine, and all people
except for teenagers are still wearing
their winter coats, and the maples
in the backyards are bare-armed wrestlers,
and the gutters are scarred with sand
and cigarette butts, and the breeze
 
kicking up from the ocean makes us
lift our muzzles like hounds.
O wind and salt!
Daffodils tremble in the yard
of the pro bono lawyer, tremble
among the faded plastic shovels of her children.
A woodpecker shouts among the bald maples
 
and Elaine maligns me: “I don’t know why you’re
outside so much. You don’t even have a dog.”
She makes me feel like dirt but that’s not
so bad. A swirl of sea-gale buffets the chimneys, 
twigs clatter onto Subarus. Daffodils, yellow as eyes,
breast the wind. Earth is thawing, they
shout, they shout, and I, on this half-
green bank, unfurl into their arms.

Dawn Potter’s many books include Chestnut Ridge (Deerbrook Editions, 2019).

Copyright 2020 Dawn Potter