JOHNSTOWN’S INDEPENDENCE DAY

The flags are out again,
which is something the flags
are always doing in July,
hung from the porch rails
of houses whose paint
has been thinking, for some years now,
about coming off.

A boy I don’t know
runs past with a sparkler,
trailing a brief and brilliant signature
that does not last
the length of the block.

Down at the park,
someone’s grandmother
has set up a folding chair
in the exact spot
she has occupied
for what I would guess is forty years,
and the band is doing
its honest best with Sousa,
which is, after all,
what Sousa was written for.

The Conemaugh runs past
without comment,
the way it has run past
every Fourth
since the one nobody talks about
on the Fourth.

I think about that sometimes.
How a town learns
to celebrate
on top of what it survived,
the way you learn to walk again
after a bad year,
not pretending it didn’t happen,
just choosing
where to put the next foot.

The fireworks, when they come,
will do what fireworks do.
The children will say oh.
The dogs will hide.
A man my father’s age
will stand on his porch
with a beer
and his hand over his heart
even though no one is watching
and there is no anthem playing,
only the small
percussive prayer
of a town
saying it is still here.

And later,
when the smoke has gone
and the streets have gone quiet
in the particular way
streets go quiet
after a celebration,
the river will keep doing
what it has always done,
which is to carry
what we hand it
without telling us
what it knows.