Springfield, Virginia
Colonels live there, commuters to the Pentagon
In sweetly-named estates: King’s Park, Orange Wood.
Springfield proper is a set of asphalt lots,
A catch-all town for realtors and mail.
At Peoples Drug, and the fast-food joints,
The hands popping open cylinders of change
Hail from Vietnam or Nicaragua, arrivistes
Wondering at the sourness of God’s people.
The high school kids who used to do the jobs
Were white, immune to history;
Andy Sulick, sheepish in a Big Ranch Stetson ha,
A row of enforced dim smiles at Burger Chef.
Eight hundred graduated in ’71. That night,
Crawling the backroads, jumping in and out
Of unfamiliar cars, I found a party at a shack.
A boy mashed me against the lean-to floor.
Along the wooded road lighting bugs flared
Like drunks with matches, seeing their way home,
And whipperwills nagged the sleeper
Until a dawn as pink and blue as litmus paper.
That is from her first book. It was my high school. I couldn't tell you if Andy's name was Sulick, but there was an Andy and Anne knew him. I don't know how you managed without that information.
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