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CAMERON BARNET

It’s easy to love what’s easily missed:

If this elbow of the city could bend itself

open, loose with the weight of its history,

loose with the long wind of Commercial Street

like an umbilical cord, loose with Whipple Street

steep slopping into Edgewood, you might feel

the flex of the Monongahela passing by, a figure-8

of fancy homes, rows and rows of neighbors

like aisles passing over a petite plateau, the hum

of some distant freight moving through the night,

and you might feel the amenity afforded

by this place—the small delight of being forgotten.

It’s easy to love what’s easily missed:

the air raid siren wailing long into a new millennium,

a highway screaming by, a river sleuthing out

this semi-suburb, well known woods wrapping

themselves around the neck of the neighborhood,

my childhood bike doing loops around the low and long hills

of concrete, tire tracks of a third-generation boy

scraped into the blacktop, third iteration of integration

into Windermere Drive, home in the crook

of the road, home by an island in the road, island

sprouting a lone tree, the tree rising taller with

each generation, centuries seeded and ceded

by the Susquehannock and Iroquois, who take

no small delight of being forgotten.

It’s easy to love what’s easily missed:

the space between vale and helm razor thin

but deep cut by borough and court claim,

land divided and sold for summer homes

on the old farmland of Jane the abolitionist,

who taught and fought for women, who fed

and hid freedom-seeking people, the Underground

Railroad being the first trains to station here before

steel and slag and industry dusted over the sleepy

cul-de-sacs and dead ends—easy to love. Easy

to miss all the life you pass by on your commute,

all the history these congested tunnels plunge through,

all our small delights cooped and cupped up

in the bent arms of embrace—hard to be forgotten.