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November 26, 2007
You Can Write About Anything: Hamden
The following poem was written by Jane Heil, a Hamden native who now resides in New York City.
1. Grading the grade-school teachers
You can write about anything; didn’t you know?
That’s the secret behind the wall of secrets.
Putnam Avenue Grammar School with its gray floors
In Whitneyville, which was part of Hamden, in Connecticut.
1945: the dusty school yard,
Miss Joslin the imposing, pouter-pigeon principal
With her jangling keys;
Gentle Miss Pedersen for kindergarten,
Miss Zeek, who was cruel, and made Kathy Johnson wet her pants in class;
Miss McVery, Miss Morley,
Mrs. Geer with a red chignon
And long red nails that could dig deep into your arm
If she needed to make a point.
Mrs. Lockett, of World History fame.
Miss Danzilio, a little bow-legged, but a whiz in math.
Mr. Allen, so full of jokes and “Say Dough-Mahj.” What was that?
We didn’t have a clue: too bad.
Mr. Beecher, blond and reticent, old Connecticut name.
Miss Hamerman, my favorite, who let me write silly school plays
And let the class perform them.
I read my Pocahontas satire to the class. She said,
“You ought to read this to the school yourself, Jane.”
Instantly, her likeness claimed an honored place
In the vast museum of my heart.
2. Rapin’ Ralph
Ralph, who in eighth grade after school
Lured me to his empty two-family house on Augur Street
And tried his best to rape me--not that I knew the word
Or what it meant. Do you ever think of that day, Ralph,
Selling your cars in New London now, the desperate wrestling,
My fear, when I realized this wasn’t just a game,
That you aimed to do something horrible to me,
Even though that stupid smile stayed pasted on
Your handsome, empty face?
That ended our little group of friends: you, me, Robert, Linda.
We could never climb to the blueberry patch on Mill Rock again
And pick berries, and sit in the sun and try to smoke.
3. The Basement Darkroom
The intensity of it all. The poetics of space remembered.
The interior of the house, each tiny room,
The basement where Dad made a darkroom for me,
His photographer daughter, developing at twelve.
The ancient trunks and dresses there. The delicate blue satin
Dance dress from Mom’s other life, before us.
The pink chiffon skirt; I loved it so much.
I wore it to third grade because I just had to,
In spite of Miss Morley’s warning.
She made me sit in the corner all afternoon
just because I loved dancing, and chiffon,
And the way it made me look when I twirled and swirled in it.
4. The Flowers he Planted
And outside, the tiny flowered rows: pansies,
Iris, tulips, lily of the valley,
Forsythia, all planted by my father
To beautify our path. I hold the beauty and the trauma
All together in my mind. I will have to carry them seething
To my grave, or until Alzheimer’s gets me
Like it got my mother forty years after we left there.
5. Naming Traumas
Shall I name the traumas? Well, there was Ralph, of course,
And Miss Morley, Pal Lynch and her gang of girls:
Seventh-graders accosting me in the stairwell,
Saying I was too friendly with the boys, stunning me into silence.
I was trapped there, cornered, ambushed. Twenty years later
She phoned. She was friendly, pleasant,
A daughter in tow, no husband, ever--and that was a big Catholic deal
In 1970.
A mixed bag.
A dog, hit by a car on Augur Street,
There in the street, dying. I edged a little closer, realized suddenly
It was Chrissy, our own black cocker spaniel. Horrified, I raced home.
Why didn’t I stay, speak a few kind words to a dying dog?
I was young then, and easily frightened.
Our favorite small jungle, at Lamkin Street; the vines we swung on
And the tiny hut we built to crawl into.
They were building a house there; the workers had left a
Wheelbarrow at an acute angle. Ann Cummins stood above us, me and my
Little brother and, smiling viciously, she pushed the wheelbarrow
Over, onto my brother’s hand, crushing it.
Is there such a thing as an evil child? I wonder, even now.
I hear his cries as we run to our house
And the three operations that weren’t going to help. And my guilt; he was my little brother.
These things happen. Mothers aren’t always there. Children sometimes
Do these things. His hand was crushed forever that day.
6. Giles Street
This poem keeps going on. It’s about a town
And a school
and a neighborhood, a hilly street of small houses
(Small at the bottom; larger at the top):
Italians, Danes, Poles.
I see all those houses in their places on my street,
And the different families in them:
The man who beat his children,
The German-Jewish refugees,
The Marionis, the Capronis (he was a farmer, really.
Later, he bought a farm in Mt. Carmel, and died
When his tractor hit a rock and flipped.)
The soda magnate.
The Yankee child molester who had a famous ancestor,
A famed Nineteenth-Century minister,
A major guy in Puritan New Haven,
Backbone of the city,
A big mucky-muck at Yale.
The two old sisters,
The physicist with the slightly Nazi wife,
The good-looking Jewish dentist,
The Hispanic physician.
Quite a distinguished group: a little U.N. I remember every face,
Every child, and nearly every parent.
Mrs. Marioni, who was very kind to me,
And gave me the run of her house.
She and her husband always fought.
“He married me for my hips,” she told me.
What could that possibly mean?
She’s ninety-one now, living in a retirement home
In Hamden. I should visit.
7. Walking to School
The path to school. I walked it four times every day.
I could take Putnam Avenue
Or Augur Street, and any of the short neat streets that formed a grid.
I could stop at the penny-candy store with the two kind owners,
Or not. I saw them on vacation at the beach
one day, and was distressed: what right had they
To come from behind the counter and take a short vacation?
child’s mind
Needed them in their proper place, in the store forever,
Like they are now.
Where was I? Oh, the town. Our little section of it.
The hills, the predators, the kindly neighbors,
The sense of life beginning.
The impatience of it all. My father saying, in an angry voice,
"You are much too sensitive,” and me not writing any poetry
For fifty years or so. Didn’t want to be too sensitive, after all.
Now at sixty-two I’m making the attempt.
You see what happens: there is a rush, a flood
An outpouring, like the wild torrents of rivers in March.
Here is mid-century Connecticut that was dammed up,
Trapped in wordless memory all these years.
I try to tame and shape it,
Try to remember that you can write about anything:
My father, the flowers, the school, the rooms,
The children, the rapist, the paths one took,
The teachers every year, the shape of a street in the ’40s and ’50s
The kind of a neighborhood
In one of the towns
In Connecticut.
-- Jane Heil 2002
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