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Looking Homeward
Bill Waldron spared my mother and father agony
by teaching me how to drive a stick in a cornfield.
Think of it as an H, he said of the lever that came
out of the steering shaft of his two-door Dodge,
which my mother called a coupay. We were on the two-rut road
around the field that the tractor took to get in and out
at planting and harvest. The grassy hump sometimes hit the underside
and Bill would say, Oh m'god, downshift, girl, easerup,
which wasn’t hard as long as I remembered to clutch—
or the car would stutter over itself
and on the passenger side, Bill would get thrown around
almost to bumping his nose on the dash.
He had a big nose, talked as if he had a cold,
and his eye was on my older sister, who dreamed of boys
and going to Africa. I felt pretty important as the vehicle
to her heart, though I knew Bill didn’t have a prayer.
My sister married a Rhodes Scholar and went to Uganda
for Uhuru. Bill married the daughter of the town monument maker
and took over the business
before he even had a chance to look away.
He marked my father’s, then my mother’s grave,
so they won't ever be forgotten in that town I drove out of.
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Anne Harding Woodworth’s seventh book of poetry, Trouble (Turning Point, 2020), includes her persona cycle, “Hannah Alive,” which became a one-woman play in verse that was a finalist at the Adirondack Shakespeare Co. festival in Essex, New York. Harding Woodworth’s poetry, reviews, and essays appear in anthologies and journals, both in print and online, such as Poet Lore, TriQuarterly, Women & Language, Crannog, Gargoyle, and Innisfree Poetry Journal. She is a co-chair of the Poetry Board at the Folger Shakespeare Library and a member of the Board of Governors at the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, MA.
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