| Ithaca, New York |
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| Ithaca is Gorges |
| From: mamaleto |
Ithaca is gorges.
1
The ubiquitous bumper sticker won’t let me forget my roots.
Hometown shale and shallows, a catalogue of creeks and swimming holes:
Six Mile,
Flat Rocks,
Cascadilla,
Taughannock,
Buttermilk,
Enfields.
And what have I forgotten?
My hometown still has places
no one ever goes:
nameless tracks turned deer trails,
the same place where just last week we scrambled through,
thirty years later, with children,
trying to find an emerald pool
where, through tunnel and light, I remember
once emerging,
breathless, under a waterfall.
But the shifty swimming hole and its ledges,
Remained elsewhere still,
almost mythical, eluding both memory,
and trial and error.
Tabula Rasa (Clean Slate)
2
Of course, there’s more to my hometown than this,
because it is a very vertical place
where people still gouge out a living
living and dying between the gorges.
There’s a think tank or two,
Llenrock and I See
where people work under slate and ivy
making books or reading them, whirling atoms
or
listening to the wind
in lake reeds.
Make no mistake,
Ithaca is more than mirroring gorges:
it’s snow and ice, Latin and Greek,
green apples and white grapes,
chestnut horses and bright flowers...
but those things, like memory, form a slippery slope,
and another poem, or two or three, waiting, wading inside me.
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