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Written by S. Donovan Mullaney
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Local Geography [by S. Donovan Mullaney]
Saturdays, my grandfather collected our garbage
in the back of his battered blue Dodge.
During my summer visits, we’d drive
ten miles to the landfill.
No radio, no tape deck,
no air conditioning. No—
Keep it simple, Stupid.
That mountain grew,
fattened by five towns,
bulldozers lifting and separating the refuse.
Engineers planted pipes for escaping methane
as our material history
decomposed in the earth.
Wildflowers grew as far up the sides as 1973;
for every year of waste above that,
the landfill’s shifting sand skin
betrayed metal scars.
At the dump, grandfather would find
a choice piece of trash:
washing machine parts or chains,
one time a cement mixer,
another a screen door
for the house.
All Perfectly Good.
He’d fill the truck bed
I’d just emptied
with a seven-year-old’s
nimble enthusiasm.
. . . . .
It took thirteen summers of weekend visits
for me to know how things fit together.
Pitch pine roots on the path to the barn,
stacked glass waiting there for my rebel rocks.
Front-yard vines punching through
granite leftover from a patio.
That twice-damned cement mixer
rusting behind used cars—
six-year-old concrete inside.
In the living room
a racing paper,
Lawrence Welk or Rockingham Park
on the television; grooves on the wall
behind my grandfather’s third easy chair.
And a peak I’d never climb:
You won’t reach half my height,
Number One Grandson.
. . . . .
Twenty-three years with my grandfather
before I’d see a hill without a king,
before I could map the geography
of nearly a century of living,
fifty years spent sleeping
in the same bedroom:
My grandparents’ conjugal bed
replaced by a single, remote-adjustable,
free gift from Medicaid,
filled by a mountain, so eroded
it curled in on itself—
the leading edge of an old continent
diving under
a tectonic red and yellow afghan.
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