New Hampshire Writers
Summer Long Gone
By Anne Trotter

There's a moment frozen in time from some summer
In my early memory.
I'm biking along a road, looking down at the edge where the pavement has crumbled
And the thick green weeds grow up.
I can't tell where the ground is, but it must be far below those leafy knots;
That knitwork of prickles and crawling life.
This road rides above it all, safety sealed down in pungent black tar
Bleached gray by time and fragmented by some summer storm
Until the illusion begins to shiver around the edges;
This road is a thin thread to depend on, when you're not safe in the steel skin of a car.
When your tanned knees and bug-bitten shins are
one flashing second away from the edge of the road,
When you could fall down and down and who knows where you'd stop
Or who could see you?
Is that water, under there? Would you fall
Down and down into an arched bower of brambles and goldenrod
And land in the pebbled muck of a stream
With crayfish scuttling under the stones at your feet
And ticks descending onto your vulnerable skin with unconcealed delight?
Would there be strange toads down there in the green gloom,
Down in the dusk under the road? Would there be a bridge long paved-over and forgotten
And a thing under the bridge with gleaming eyes delighted at the company?  
After all,
It must have been a long long time
Since anyone went past this place on foot,
Since the days when men rode and walked instead of drove.
And then it's gone
And I'm past the spot
And there's a hill to go up where the pavement is more substantial
And the single note of the singing summer insects fades away
Into an imprint on my mind of a decades-old and pollen-crusted summer
Long gone now.