The door screen is rusty brown
Except
where the paint of the
Red/Blue/Yellow
stenciled trademark
Still reminds
no-longer-customers
Who walk past the rotting wood,
Asbesto-shingled,
empty storefront
Of twenty
cent a loaf bread.
Weeds that climb the walls still
Scarcely
venture into the
Two-car parking lot, now a U-turn
site
For twenty
years worth of
Juvenile,
neighborhood-buzzing
Adventurers
on the deteriorating
Two-lane
highway.
Grass has taken the road
That curled
up the hollow
Behind
the store:
Its four family homes gone:
One fire,
Two dismantled,
One's remains
still gnawed
By whatever
termites choose
Rotting
lumber over rotting logs.
The owner of that little store
Died last
winter:
Hartland
Nursing Home,
Her residence for seven years
(The store's
been closed for
Seventeen).
One child who bought Wilson’s
Splendid
Bread remains:
His children board a schoolbus
Daily,
from the parking lot,
The little
square of mud and gravel,
Rounded
at its edge by grass.
The others have gone,
Leaving
some few parents
Still living
up the muddy,
Winter-slick
roads
In a mingling of communities
and farms
Turned by the spreading
Highway-city
world
Into wooded hillsides dotted with
Rotting,
falling shacks
And daily fewer of those
Poor, warm,
comfortable
Spotless
homes
Where Wilson's Splendid Bread
Once did
injustice
To the
hearty richness
Of an otherwise
home-cooked meal.
10/23/83
Appeared in Hill & Valley vol.
6, no. 9, April 1984
