By fate, flaw or fancy, I make my home on an incline in the rocky soil of New York; land where tone and dialect change on a dime. From the tortured ‘o’ of a Brooklyn coffee to the unbearable nasal of the Buffalo twang buried in snow and on to the flat sound of Rochester; language brushed even by open fields, hunters and the power of the Genesee flowing North for goodness sake!
I sing the true laborer out on the greasy roads, brunted up against frost bitten winds and the line man, swinging on the wires…graciously allowing me time to read about distant shores and other days…for I am a true dreamer.
By hour, by genetics I remember Daddy polishing my scuffed Mary Janes on a Saturday evening for church in the morning. The lineman in the cold strings lines and props poles and slugs down scalding coffee and thick beef sandwiches as Daddy listens to the wind and polishes back and forth; first with a cloth, then with a thickly bristled brush and I dream of heated shores and other lives somewhere else.
I sense it is all somewhere else; far from the roots of my soul…
690 Saint Paul 