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.
