Page 28 - WTP VOl. X #6

Sydney Lea
Teen
Hints of that anxious time remain:
a day, for instance, when I etched my initials into the bark of a lordly beech
below the ones for that dream-girl, Patricia.
How strange, I forget her last name now.
I do remember the season, spring.
Pollen, yellowed by sun’s retreat, descended from boughs like the finest rain,
a veil between me where I stood, a puny
knife in my hand, and her window upstairs.
I’d ridden through woods on my hay-bellied Shetland, Miss Prim, a mount devoid of flare.
Did my Beatrice stir in that red brick house? People claimed she’d come back for the summer from some far-off college I’d never heard of,
but she’d likely head somewhere else, I figured,
forever untouchable, five years older.
I needed a miracle—and felt dead certain I’d never see one. A fruitful life
would therefore escape me, as if forbidden
to a poor adolescent, entirely distinct
from his most direct descendant: me.
I was too young to yearn for peace, which I thought must be something dull. Yet now I survey
our placid Connecticut River valley,
with its fecund strawberry fields, which delight so many local bourgeois lovers
of tempting food—in short, my tribe.
My torment, almost catastrophic,
in those dusky woods confused me then: it stimulated me. Resourceless,
I climbed on my sluggish pony again.
She’d been tearing up bunches of weed and grass. Sprigs were swimming in foam by her snaffle, and thrumming deerflies, midges, gnats
hovered around her ears and muzzle.
I look back now on the shame of it all.
With a switch I flogged her clear from head to rounded rump in a futile effort
to break us out of our heavy plod.
21
A former Pulitzer finalist and winner of the Poets’ Prize, Lea served as founding editor of New England Review and was Vermont’s Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2015. He is the author of twenty-three books, including, most recently, Seen from All Sides: Lyric and Everyday Life, essays (Green Writers Press, VT, 2021), and Here, poetry (Four Way Books, NYC, 2019). In 2021, he was presented with his home state of Vermont’s most prestigious artist’s distinction: the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts.