Bangor, Maine, 1967 (poem)

That place sometimes seems to me lost
    forever, the Penobscot hopelessly defiled
with these intervening years of its long unwinding,
    its trees thinning about the temples,
        gone, in fact, almost blind
        with this winter's heavy coat
of featureless forgetting, its silent snow.

But even yet there are moments when a shard
    of green memory will poke through, keen
as a scalpel's edge, bright as the frozen sheen
    of a winter morning:  I suddenly see you
        as you were then, a young woman
        lolling under trees in her backyard--
and the Maine spring burgeons for me all anew.

Of course, we are both far from there now.
    Draped with our children, bedizened
with our past husbands, and our ex-wives
    those first days beneath the boughs
        where the little river lies
        seem from another's life--
just old items of clothing donned as an afterthought.