Stephen Haven: Roadside Portals

Another fire which saddened the community took place in 1967 at the Guy Park Avenue home of Tony Greco… Greco was not home but his wife and children died. Their home was behind Fire Department Engine #5.
—The Daily Gazette

.
Whenever I think of you, Annette Greco,
I see roadside altars that open portals.
I see drivers slipping by those mounds
of cardboard signs and paper flowers:
We miss you! We love you still! Some passersby,
some strangers wondering who? I see in
the breakdown the acute angles of a skid.

But you did not die by the roadside.
Our fears were much less tangible that year.
Air raid drills in a break from math or
language arts. Beneath our desks
we were very still. The angel of death
passed over if only we froze like rabbits,
half-hidden in the open, a long division

that has no quotient. Girl who slept behind
Firehouse Engine #5, girl I barely knew,
I would like to offer you a mug of cocoa.
Our 4th grade year at Bacon School, we felt
your shy wonder, then that winter the weight
of your audacious chair, the empty space
half-hidden there. That year, I tip-toed down

my mother’s bare back stairs, flipped
our burners on so I could watch them go
cold again. I checked the fuel tanks
in the idle of that night kitchen. Only
a boy could shut them off again. More than
an intercontinental missile, more than
World War II, in our galoshes we skipped by

your black plume. One day I saw it
on the internet. Who still grieves for you?
You drifted to the afterlife of web sites
that might have never marked your life.
Absent, tactile, abstracted in us, we gaped
at a boyish distance as in black, in yellow,
the Fire Marshall taped to your boarded door
a gap in us we were never meant to touch.

~~~

Copyright 2025 Stephen Haven

Stephen Haven’s fourth collection of poems, The Flight from Meaning is forthcoming from Slant Books in spring 2025. He teaches at Leslie University.