It's the Little Towns I Like by Thomas Lux

It's the Little Towns I Like

It’s the little towns I like 

with their little mills making ratchets 

and stanchions, elastic web, 

spindles, you 

name it. I like them in New England, 

America, particularly-providing 

bad jobs good enough to live on, to live in 

families even: kindergarten, 

church suppers, beach umbrellas ... The towns 

are real, so fragile in their loneliness 

a flood could come along 

(and floods have) and cut them in two, 

in half. There is no mayor, 

the town council’s not prepared 

for this, three of the four policemen 

are stranded on their roofs ... and it doesn’t stop 

raining. The mountain 

is so thick with water parts of it just slide 

down on the heifers—soggy, suicidal— 

in the pastures below. It rains, it rains 

in these towns and, because 

there’s no other way, your father gets in a rowboat 

so he can go to work.