Author's Note​: The picture is a blurry copy of my high school yearbook senior photo.  The poem was written over 50 years ago, first published in The Cimarron Review and reprinted in my early collection, Regions With No Proper Names  (St. Martin’s, 1975).  Looking back, I guess I was “young” then.  I grew up in Mr. Gorsline’s town, which is really the village of Round Lake, New York.  My father was the village postmaster.  A town ordinance made it mandatory for all roaming cats to wear bells, which would alert the squirrels that ran rampant on the dirt paths through the village .  I was the morning paperboy, delivering The Schenectady Gazette (poets are allowed to fudge details and I often consider a poem a fiction rather than a true confession).  But the Schwinn is actual, a purple Schwinn, the village’s first geared three speed bicycle that I bought with accumulated profits from paper delivering at dawn.  The father-daughter baseball toss and catch is probably my next door neighbor, Mr. Lohnes and his daughter Shelby.  Mr. Gorsline was real.  His daughter, Doris, still lives in Round Lake.  Mr. Gorsline was enormously caring and let many village residents go for months putting things “on charge.”  But he wouldn’t have walked “blocks” to his house, as there were no “blocks” per se in Round Lake.  The village is there, relatively unchanged, beneath the pines and beside the lake.  It was idyllic then and, the last time I slowly drove through it, is still idyllic.  Some current residents are even putting gingerbread back on their houses that formerly had been summer camp cottages.  Rereading the poem, I recognize that a central motif in all my subsequent poetry has continued to be “calm,” how to be calm, how to get back to calm and simplicity during the chaotic and increasingly surrealistic early 21st Century—with attendant memories of the late 20th Century, and the horrors of World War II, in which my father served and during which his best friend died on the beach at Normandy.  But I say, I say (and as a Buddhist, now, I say), taking the risk of sentiment, that Calm does exist, Mr. Gorsline’s town does exist.  To paraphrase Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, somewhere there’s a place for us.

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Mr. Gorsline’s Town


Trying to write a poem simple as his town
is really, I
keep thinking how the streetlights all
shut off at dawn

and the paperboy, riding no hands
on his Schwinn,
distinguishes between
who tips and who pays

by whether the big fat News
lands on doorstep or lawn
and at noon
the firehouse whistles.

And at seven, an automatic switch
turns streetlights on,
a father throws his daughter
the last hard one

as Mr. Gorsline locks
his grocery store up,
walks seven blocks home,
meeting friends,

remarking the calm.  And I know
the sentiment
must blur the horror out,
but I say, I say his town does exist.

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