The Hilton (EPC)

The Hilton

Two years ago, I was standing outside a nightclub,

across the street from the town square in Northampton,

MA, and an old drunk told me about the Hilton hotel

they were going to build, right there in the middle of

the square.  Two years later, I remembered the story,

sitting on a town square bench, and thought of the

twelve-ton brick of metal squatting there.  I still don’t

know if it was true. 

It is to be large and white

with tourists milling all around it, fallow

decadance. And oh such soft and whiter sheets

as it grows old and dirt

from summer’s lack of shoes

for walking sticks – call it

Metropolitan. (The buses will grow dense).

And old Brigadier General

Pulaski won’t have known,

he’s too tied up in new

revolutionary thinking

as a stone

that sits, a monument –

first waking in the fields there in Elysium

to know his country’s made!

To be swallowed up, and people still are

talking.) Earnesty prides itself too much

on its own man’s thinking.

The square, peopled with benches

is a turning point, to pivot all this

weight, and people trying to make their

turns of it

find themselves turned,

wide-eyed, deer in the headlights, drunk.

But the Hilton will be large and white,

though it is no great metal moth

that spins its silk in loss.

            The tawny brick wing-walls about it

            are tarnished,

                                   not yet fall’n on.