The Last Saltbox

The only New England
saltbox in a neighborhood
of ranches, ramblers,
and vinyl-side split-levels:
they’ve let it go all to hell.

White timbers dingy,
mildewed, bracing blown leaf-drifts;
boxwoods gone feral,
engorged, engulf the windows
below soil-stuffed gutters.

In the short, steep drive,
on asphalt like glacier melt,
a black Mercedes:
tires tired and saggy,
chipmunks in the air filter.

Round here the street names
are all cities in Britain:
Ipswich, Halifax,
Plymouth—cutesy and contrived
by Truman-era planners.

Or names once removed—
not the old world, but the new:
“Merrimack” gives it away.
Unimaginative, those
Calvinists, those Puritans.

But the one structure
that fits the brand now crumbles.
What’s in a name? Here’s
Aldershot, known for ranches
and three-ton diesel pickups.

On Cornwall, a crew
of roofers blasts Norteno;
by the principle
of synchronicity, a
crew in Cornwall blasts bluegrass.

Or do they also
blast Norteno? Jung confounds.
In Nuevo León,
crews blast the Helston Town Band
and grunt Cornish epithets.

Lexingtons I’ve known
are three in number: here, in
the hills of VA,
the one in Massachusetts.
The latter had saltboxes.

Recall quite a few,
but that was ages ago.
Are they still there?
Or do they crumble away?
Do they vanish everywhere?

Extinctions can come
quickly, as a mass die-off,
or in a rapture,
the blessed swooshed up skyward,
white timbers left to wither.

No, it goes slowly,
geologically, grinding
the world flat. This ranch
has bay windows. That one,
Tudor accents. Leaves still drift.