I drive four states to visit the Martins Ferry
you gave me; the one I’ve always thought of
as a kind of wellspring of tenderness.
Just past where you swam, at the bend of the Ohio River,
both banks slope down to overlap like the arms
of a schoolboy asleep on his desk.
Here, you grew up among those who had no voice.
Up on the hill, silvered tree trunks lean
with gravestones in unmowed grass.
I recall daguerreotypes of civil war battlefields.
A pink tricycle on the lawn; someone’s mother
and someone’s grandmother, both smoking cigarettes,
pull out of their driveway in a Toyota
with the back window taped over
with a garbage bag. I ask if they can tell me
where your old high school was.
“Oh honey, that’s long gone,” they answer,
in a cadence that sounds like it’s from an old
Carter Family song, about what never returns.
I make a pledge to remember their harmony
before I thank them. But I do not want to go
back the way I came. My sadness is
the near enemy of compassion.
The scornful eyes of the young truck driver
watch me from the rearview mirror of his
sixteen wheeler, where we are both surrounded by
anonymous steel sheds, keep out signs
and empty lots, on the only strip of road
that separates your people from the river,
where I take what is not permitted:
a swim in the purifying and ruined waters of the Ohio.
Sean Sutherland has had poems published in the literary magazines: the Meadow, Lime Hawk, Gravel, Prick of the Spindle, Blast Furnace, the 30th anniversary anthology; the Writers Studio at 30, and the Maine Review, for which he won honorable mention for their poetry prize in 2015. He was nominated for a Pushcart by the literary magazine Sleet in 2019, and recently had two poems selected in an anthology titled, Poetry for The Actor, A Guide to Deeper Truth.
Sean is a MacDowell Colony Fellow. He self-published a chapbook of short poems and haiku in 2010 entitled, Forever in the City, Forever Arriving, and has had plays of his produced in New York City, Los Angeles, and Maine. He is currently studying with Philip Schultz in his master class at The Writers Studio in New York City, and recently discovered the joys of camping in a tent!
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