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PORTSIDE CULTURE

MY GRANDPA WAS TWO  
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Peter Neil Carroll

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_ Stopping in Trempealeau, Wisconsin, during a trip along the
Mississippi, historian and poet Peter Carroll contemplates the flow of
time. _

, Higganum Hill Books

 

Uphill block of red-brick buildings,
open for waterside business, 1888,
year my grandpa turned two;
grain merchants now gone,
The Woodmen's Society,
old sawbones barber, gone;
above the river, an oblong plaque
badged the arched doorway.

Makes me remember the immigrant glazier,
my Grandpa, who windowed such buildings:
He'd stand, one black boot braced
on the highest rung,
one hung in space,
instep balancing a light of glass
about to enter the frame; he'd hum
a gravelly tune, dance his body weight,
heave big shoulders, push hard,
then tap a tin dart into the sash.

Before my eyes the building rises
as two gentlemen pass behind me;
one points his cane,
saying to this spry mate,
"My Daddy used to own that site" --
and the workers who sang, my grandpa,
as if someone's kicked the ladder from under their feet,
drop from the scaffold,
vanish from a small town's past.

_Peter Neil Carroll, poet, activist and historian, died in September
of last year after a short illness at the age of 80. He was one of the
key individuals involved in founding the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
Archives, and was also the long-time poetry moderator at Portside.
From Riverborne: a Mississippi Requiem, available from Higganum Hills
Books._

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INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

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