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We scrambled over micah-flaked white quartz outcrops  
that caught streaks of gold from the sun
descending from Camel's Hump.

Our hilltop playground of low fortresses, whales, dinner tables and dragon spines.

Around the dirt road bend and through a lane of aging maples,
Mary Azarian, a New Yorker, (so they say)
moved to a gray-weathered farmhouse and 
my grandma's unneighborly resentments.

An Armenian banjo-picker husband
augured Goddard College’s
as-yet unnamed hippies
down Plainfield way. 
 
They didn’t farm the place or 
hold down "real" jobs.
She tied a red scarf round her billy goat’s neck
and claimed she was an artist.

The source of aversion was undivulged.

Was it rock-ribbed conservatism?
Puritan favor for “productive” work?  
Depression-era calluses 
rubbed into her farmer soul? 
 
Only prejudice, unyielding like the stony ridges
barely buried in Cabot’s thin hilltop soil,
holding fast against wind and snow and
plow and playful creation?

Or was an Azarian guilty of some unseen offense,
forcing, 
like the frost's constant heaving of
glacial debris to 
pasture's surface,
flinty sideways glances of disdain?

                                             http://www.maryazarian.com/


2007  revised  2018 2020


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