Ode to Johnstown

You can hear the Conemaugh from many places
if you stop the car and roll down the window,
which I have done on a Tuesday afternoon
for no particular reason
except that the river, like an old uncle,
expects to be acknowledged.

The mills are quiet now,
their long brick spines stretched out along the water,
not dead, just retired,
and remembering, in their sleep,
the noise.

A boy goes by on a bicycle
with a baseball mitt looped over the handlebars,
and there it is —
the whole American century
turning the corner before I can find a caption for it.

The hills lean in a little,
patient, attentive,
old listeners at a story
they have heard before
and intend to hear again.

And underneath everything,
the river that once forgot itself —
1889, that awful afternoon —
goes on about its quiet business
of being a river,
a century of apologies
folded into the current.

A woman waters the geraniums on her porch.
A bell rings somewhere,
probably a church, possibly a school
in a town that has earned its sound effects.

I keep walking past the bakery,
past the parish hall,
past a mural of someone’s grandfather
whose name I don’t know,
an echo of the people who stayed.

This is the part where I’m supposed to write
something about resilience, or the spirit of a place.
I don’t think I will.
I’ll just stand on this sidewalk
in the kind of afternoon light
that turns everything the color
of a photograph someone meant to frame,
and let the town go on being itself.