Dead End

Come with me, my friend – take heart: descend: pretend:
this Long Island Railroad platform need suspend you in its
glaring air no longer – take its metal stairs down to the street
and follow me through Oldfield Avenue whose asphalt
links two dozen locked compartments of suburban houses

to each other – silent stares, shut mouths, despairing lives
behind the window curtains – look ahead of you, try not
to spy: though you'll be tempted to apply the immanently
underlying menace that you sense to everything you see,
stay close to me: bear the lack of human bounty – come

upon the county line, and walk the road that is its spine –
stick to the Suffolk side – until you've reached the space
delineated on the left called Cottage Place: travel down it
to the coolly rounded grace that ends its cul-de-sac, enwraps
you in its mapped embrace: that facing spreading house

ahead, green-roofed, brown-shingled, covered short front
porch, and try to swallow, hug yourself, breathe deeply,
rock so very gently back and forth that you can summon
up the comfort of a mother holding you in an equivalently
cold November wind. Accept that every member of your

family is gone except for you, and that although you must
construe this odd dismembered venue as the site of your
beginning, you are grateful to the point of crying joyfully that
you are winning in the battle to be free of it. Pray that this
may be the last, except in certain dreams, you see of it.


.