Sherry Fairchok
January 2004

Three Towns


In Taylor, Pennsylvania, the earth angers
without warning and will not stay put.
Our towns are layered, one over the other:
one with staked tomato vines and parked Chevrolets,
where starlings peck at bread crusts by Baba’s alley gate;
and then a hollow space below, sleeping deep
as ruins, left to cave-ins and rats, its ceiling
faceted by miners’ picks, its rail tracks
rusted by leaking rain. We thump over it
day and night until the earth knocks beneath us
like an angry neighbor. See that crack branching
across our parlor wall, a crucifix
and pussy willow tacking its seams?
That crack maps the morning Baba heard beams groan
in the cellar, felt windows thrum in their frames
as if a coal truck had passed, though the alley
was empty. Under a jittery ceiling light,
her dust cloth balled in her fist, she waited,
resigned, and watched next door’s place open up
like a dollhouse, all its peony-patterned
wallpaper revealed, its staircase steady
through a mist of plaster dust, like a ladder
propped against heaven, that little Catholic
neighborhood levitating just above ours.

from The Palace of Ashes, CavanKerry Press, 2002.