Buffalo Bill’s son (minus hat), with florid face and cream-colored hair slicked back,
a country western legend, perhaps, or NASCAR granddad;
or a fur trapper woke up on the wrong side of the world
in the wrong time who, lacking a good saloon
where he could rest his mud-caked boots, drink rotgut and wait for a shootout,
came to town meeting, both barrels blazing against bureaucrats and taxes.
Fading purple banners drape the gym, heralding the school’s athletic heights.
At a humble angle, a basketball hoop glows above the aging moderator’s head.
Pony-tailed, neck-tied in leather jacket, he once ran wild on this shiny hardwood.
People here still remember when the gym erupted
the night he scored in overtime, or strained silently on folding chairs
to hear his narrator’s lines in “Our Town” on the dusty stage where he now lords.
The chair of the selectboard sits nearby,
who never commanded this space in high school; she sang off-key,
was too fat and couldn’t act, but now looks out imperiously.
Assessors, finance committee, and those paid to be here —
clerk, counsel, highway superintendent — ask for votes
in monotones to move money between accounts
and pay unemployment for the math teacher and librarian laid off last fall,
recorded for posterity and the brittle-boned:
videoed by a pale, redheaded teen directing his first shoot,
reported for the local daily by a bored transient doodling bleacher notes.
The rare townspeople who speak saunter Sammy Davis-like
to sing their fondled poems at open mike, and some make encores:
a solemn, short-haired woman quoting procedures,
a former selectman who endorses articles as though it's expected of him,
and big-bellied Buffalo Bill, opinions sharp as mutton-chop whiskers,
alleging backroom deals, irritated, still, by the paltry sum
the town gave him when it took his land for the sewer line a dozen years ago,
exercising his right to be heard, reading amendments in his slow, flourishing hand,
to put on the ballot or at least table the proposal to send out quarterly tax bills.
2008
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