This week we feature a poem by the accomplished and much beloved Cape Elizabeth poet Jonathan Aldrich, who passed away last week. In “Willow Street,” from Aldrich’s first book, the speaker describes a place “not far from here” that also seems to be something more than a place. As the poem weaves gracefully between the tangible and the abstract, the space and state it conjures feel both mysterious and deeply, timelessly familiar.

Aldrich wrote over a dozen books in his 40-year career as a poet. At Harvard College, he won the William Lloyd Garrison Prize for poetry and the Academy of American Poets Award, and he was a Frost Scholar at The Bread Loaf School of English. His translation of Charles Baudelaire’s “Le Voyage,” illustrated by Allison Hildreth and hand-printed by David Wolfe Productions, won a Baxter Society Award. Aldrich also taught English at several colleges, including for 25 years at the Maine College of Art, where he was recognized with a Best Teacher award. A major retrospective of his work, “The Old World in his Arms,” is forthcoming from Wolfson Press at the University of Indiana. He will be missed for his vast curiosity, his puckish wit and his gracious, generous empathy.

 

Willow Street

By Jonathan Aldrich

 

Not far from here it bends, slightly, like tomorrow.

The houses along it, dusk-colored, are mostly square.

Guilt, being only a secret sorrow

over something lost, is not there.

 

Not far from here, it has no waterfall

or failing wood—

all things returned we still

look forward to, long afterward.

 

Here the odd, off-center log shifts

and arranges, as stockings depend

innocently again on the hearth, and the drift

will not change from the intended, or end.

 

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Willow Street,” copyright © 1977 by Jonathan Aldrich, appeared in his book Croquet Lover at the Dinner Table (University of Missouri Press).

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