Where I come from

WHERE I COME FROM

Donna Dufresne

I come from a place where you can hear

The tap, tap, tap of the milkman’s boots on a cement walk

And a whistle fading into the dawn

Telling me my father has gone

Into the world of working men

I come from a place where the screen door slams

And shakes the walls

As mothers step out upon

Their pea-shucking porches to call

And we scurry like tiny denim insects

Out of secret places toward the light of home

I come from a place where bloodlines run hot through my veins

And we are still fighting those Indian wars

Even as our skin begins to fade

And my grandfather’s baseball bat stands

In that corner by the door

Waiting for someone who will dare to cross that line

I come from a place where women pin their dreams on clotheslines hung just so

A color code of hope all washed up and tidy

And yet you know

There must be more to life than this

When you rub your nose deep into crisp cotton sheets

That remind you of the bluest of summer skies

I come from a place where men work hard and close to the earth

Their sweat smelling of diesel fuel and the piston grease of tractors

And you know that they have pulled themselves

Up by their bootstraps every day of their lives

Because they have told you so at the end of the day

By their silent, vacant smiles

I come from a place where you can eat off the floor

In a kitchen wrapped in ivy wallpaper

That hides the angry-fisted walls that were too thin to begin with

And the warm earthy scent of baked beans and brown bread

Dances with my grandmother’s dandelion greens dug up with a fork

And set to boil with salt pork

On the back of a kerosene stove.

I come from a place where my grandfather’s inventor hands

Have fashioned the tools on which factories ran

And Sunday is a day for church and baseball on the radio

Which floats through that watermelon curtained house

Like his dreams

Oh, his dreams of what he might have been

OH, OUR DREAMS OF WHAT WE MIGHT HAVE BEEN