Goodbye B-C

This poem was written shortly after I moved to the city after living most of the previous year in the Idaho wilderness at Meyers Cove. The B-C (pronounced bee bar see) was (is?) a dude ranch at Meyers Cove. I was the caretaker during the off season one winter many years ago.

Goodbye B-C

Goodbye B-C.
Goodbye wide, sunny windows
looking out on mountain forests
and more space than I’ll ever want for myself,
but not more than I’ve ever needed.

Goodbye Rams Creek,
you crystal delight;
January cascade of ice
masking your happy gurgle.

Goodbye you sound-filled quiet.
How well – how joyously –
I listened to you.

I shudder to say -
Hello Village.
Sixty apartments; sixty compartments.
My one tiny window is not enough
for my newly-opened eyes.
Your impersonal ways offend me.

I shudder
to look beyond your window and see – and hear –
your city.
Where is your life?
Have you missed it long?
Or is there no memory in landscaped grounds,
in one-piece fiberglass shower stall/tubs?
in side-by-side carpeted boxes
that leak their noises and their life-silences
into one another.

Goodbye B-C.
I would mourn your loss with tears
but tears do not come easily here:
the void of life-silence will not hear of it.

I will make my sounds in quiet,
and wonder what sort of person
in the adjoining carpeted box
hears.