The Summer of '36 (a Minnesota Prose Poem)

The Sumer of ’36
(A Minnesota Prose Poem, out of St. Paul)

People of the city were sitting on the curbs of the streets, down along the riverbank on the grass, sleeping on blankets, to cool themselves off. …there were strange faces of old men and women with children, stamped with terminal loveliness, which inspired her with a kind of protective compassion, and with that fear which says with each glimpse, there is an unknown.

She lived, during that summer of 1936, in a small room, on the first floor of an old mansion, near Rice Park, downtown, St. Paul, Minnesota, near the Mississippi River, a hop-skip-and-jump, away. It was July and the evening was hot. On the grass outside of the large house where she was a maid, she sat cross-legged. Sweat trickling down her back, armpits, and forehead-the arc lights of the city had just gone on. Her eyes energetically ablaze—at sixteen, she did not complain—it was then, and it was now, she did not believed in a prodigious happiness, from that day on.

She stumbled in the gray-darkness, from street light to street light, resting here and there wherever she found an open spot of grass, a few babies could be heard crying in the distant and sinister dark; people rising and moving and dismissing her, a few gracious smiles.

When she died at eighty-three, she said to me, “My dear child, I never forgot those far-off days in ‘36, they were the finest rush the devil I had ever given me, it persuaded me fate and God, had been on my side.


Written 12-2009/reviesed and reedited, 5-2010