Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

This is my hometown.
The ice just went
          out of the lake,
          so it’s spring.

When I visit
          I always walk the
                     length of main street to remind myself.

You know, the old stroll down memory lane.

The house there is where Patty Meyers used
     to live. She told me where babies come from.
                    Your mother’s belly button.
          Her big brother, an irrefutable source, told her.
          And we told all our friends the answer to the
                     unasked question.

Heres the Mosers’ house. I bit their kid
           when he wouldn’t give me his apple.
           He went inside and bit his sister Marian.
                      I don’t know who she bit.

This is the Catholic Church and the house
           where the priest lived. Latin and incense
                      were all we knew about the Catholics
                      except that their way to heaven wasn't ours.
            No ecumenism in those days.

Across the street is the tallest building in town, the grade
             school. It was made of brick in 1903 and they
                      had a terrible time knocking it down
                      when they wanted a new school. The
                      walls were three bricks thick. Inside, it
                      always smelled of sweeping compound that
                      Mr. Lerdall, the janitor, used on all the old
                      wooden floors.
             My dad went to this school, too, and we had the same
                       second grade teacher, Miss Douglas. She
                       hit your hands with a ruler if you were bad.
                       I worked at being very good. I wonder
                       if she ever hit my dad.

Next to the grade school is the high school. I was nervous the
             first day I moved from one building to the other. A girl
             I knew, who was two years older, gave me what she 
             thought was kindly advice. She said I should take shorter
             steps if I wanted to look more “lady-like’.
             I tried to take her advice, but it felt like having
             bound feet, so I went through the entire four years
             loping along, and no one else seemed to notice.

You have to be careful here. This is where the sidewalk is broken
             and uneven. I fell more than once roller-skating,
             so I know. This is where my friend and I put our initials
              in the wet cement. MH and GM. We were going to print
              “Friends Forever”, but a grownup approached, so we     
              stopped immortalizing ourselves.

Here’s the English lit. teacher’s house.
               She wore the same dress every day from
               September to Christmas, when she got a new one to
               alternate. We studied “A Tale of Two Cities” for that
               entire semester, too. Both dress and Dickens are
               imprinted.

This is the Company Store where my Aunt Caroline and Uncle Chris
               worked. Whenever a customer came in, the man who
               worked with my uncle hurried to the restroom. My uncle
               had to wait on everyone.

My mother bought our groceries at the Company Store. She phoned
               in the order and the delivery boy brought it to the house
               in a little truck. This saved her from going out when it
               was cold. And it gets very cold here. Cold as a “dead
               witch’s tit”, as they say. We wouldn’t say that because of
               the questionable word. We learned in Sunday School not
               to say Gosh or Darn because they are just substitutes
               for the real swear words. I think we heard about the
               F-word by the time we hit puberty, but even my uncles,
               who swore a lot, never said that one.

This is the drug store where we bought ice cream. The first time
               I asked for a cone, the girl said, “You want vanilla?”
               I said, “No, I want white.” I knew that vanilla in
               my mother’s kitchen was brown and I wanted white.
               Everyone laughed, but I didn’t think it was funny.

Here’s my favorite place in the whole town, the Zim Zim Theatre.
              I loved and adored the Zim Zim and almost every movie
              they showed, except Westerns. Most people would guess
              that my favorite movie star was Shirley Temple, but they’d
              be wrong. Ginger and Fred are my all-time and forever
              choice. It cost a dime to go to a movie and with a
              nickel’s worth of penny candy, I could eat through the
              entire show, including the previews and the short
              subjects.

We came downtown with our mothers on Saturday night, the only
              night when the stores were open.
              The country folks came to town, too.
                      They sat in their cars gawking. We called them
                      hicks. We lived in town, after all, and were
                                       obviously more sophisticated.

This is one of the taverns. Most small towns in this part of the
             the world have as many taverns as churches, but our town
             had one more church. All of the taverns were owned by
             Italians, also the bowling alley. They lived on the south
             end of town and ate garlic. I had a big crush in grade
             school on one of the tavern owner's kids, but I knew it
             couldn’t go anywhere. Italians were off-limits to
            Norwegians then and we were “goodnorwegians”, as my
            grandmother said. I wasn’t even full-blooded, since my dad
            was a Dane, but grandma overlooked this. She knew the
            Norwegian side would prevail. And all of her thirty-one
            grandchildren knew that being Norwegian was the best that
            you could be.

And here’s the end of main street. This is the Norwegian Lutheran
           Church that we went to. Next door is the Swedish Lutheran
           Church. It’s bigger and made of brick. My mother said it
           was the way the Swedes had of showing off all their money.
            It was clear that Norwegians (once again superior) were
            more modest and therefore that much closer to heaven.

Much that I learned in my hometown had to be altered over time.
             But one thing I haven’t mentioned remained unchanged.
             From one end to the other, main street is one mile long.
                         Time has imposed its weight on me, but distance
                         I will know forever.