The home of my childhood

316 First Street, Scotia, New York. From one of my mother's slides.

When I was a baby we lived in the two-colored house behind the tree, in the rented apartment on the first floor. Just after Richard was born in 1943, my folks bought this place, and we lived there until the summer of 1950. They paid $6000 for a two-family house with a basement and attic on four city lots with a garage and a row of rental garages on Second Street. Some of their friends told them that they would never be able to pay for such an expensive house! The 1940 census has just been released and there we found that, at this time, my father was making $3000 per year at General Electric in Schenectady across the Mohawk River. The rent on the flat had been $35 per month. In 1950, they bought the farm (140 acres, 3 barns, substantial but derelict house, 40 acres was oak woodland.) for $11,400. At this point, I don't know what they sold the house on First Street for, but my heart often returns there.

The Inlet
   

In a dream I go

out into a sunlit street

and I see a boy walking

clear-eyed in the light.

I recognize him, he is

Billy Lippert, wearing the gray

uniform of the school

we attended many years ago.

And then I see that my brother

is with me in the dream,

dressed too in the old uniform.

Our friend looks as he did

when we first knew him,

and until I wake I believe

I will die of grief, for I know

that this boy grew into a man

who was a faithful friend

who died.

                Where I stood,

seeing and knowing, was time,

where we die of grief. And surely

the bright street of my dream,

in which we saw again

our old friend as a boy

clear-eyed in innocence of his death,

was some quickly crossed

small inlet of eternity.

Wendell Berry

   

Given; Poems, Counterpoint, 2005, page 12.

Here's the task now: begin a poem with the words, "In a dream I go . . ." When I do this, I will doubtless be walking along First Street. I admire the almost-stanza break midline, when the poem shifts out of the dream into the poet's thought about time. I think I will try syllabics for this, although Berry is not using them here, A task for the New Year: In a dream I go . . . .