We’ve been here before 
Not ‘here’ in the literal sense,
but such an evening path to Perfection
If you live on Perfection Road,
you know the signs.
The sorcery of twilight when an autumn afternoon
     nuzzles August balm
and then the light fades, so soon this time of year
And your street, your road,
each house after perfect house,
silence unbroken, no traffic finding this way,
    nor wandering through, confused,
the driver’s nose in a map… 
No motorcycles, power tools, radios
nothing at all to spoil a perfect silence,
smear with words 
the perfect end of a perfect day.
And not one perfect person,
old, young or in between
stepping out of doors 
to watch the sun set over Hillside Pond
or see the full moon rise above 
    Mount Blue,
the perfect place from which 
to watch the seething traffic back up on the way
to pop-idol stadium
                        

Yes, I would have chosen others.
Is there no line descending from a prosperous property owner 
in Stratford-on-Avon,
that commonplace village I picture as something like  
a housing project in Cedarville 
picked over by the Planning Board?

Or from the Lake Country where wee Willy discovered 
divinity in a blade of grass,
grown from roots I would surely cherish,
if they were mine…

Not to these, no, nor to the author of England’s green
     and pleasant land, 
or to that immortal depicter of urns, short-lived, surely, 
but what of the longer-lived siblings?
No lines crossing our own, after oceans forded, plagues forestalled…?

Yet one line of notable New Englanders, founded not by rhymesters
but by Separators from James’ kingly-headed church,
having arrived in a place they hopefully christened “Concord,”
later entangling through many distant and sidelong acts of matrimony 
the successors of the famously frowning Plimoth “Elder” Brewster
(no laughing, please; no clapping either; dancing? Never!)

True, I might have chosen more joyous forebears:
Adventurers, poets, lovers and heroes of the pen,
but thankful am I, on this and all other days,
for lines that crossed in the nick of flesh

and for latter-day recognitions that 
brought us, my siblings and my aging self,
to know in the bosom of our modest celebrations 
some tidbits and tales of life’s interwoven pattern;
and stronger cause to be grateful to recall these, our pilgrims of time,
on so thankful a day.