Toward an All-Purpose Elegy
–at Bear Ridge Speedway, Vermont
What if I wrote a reusable elegy?
I’d have chances enough to apply it. For some reason the thought
occurs to me here. I sit with two small grandsons,
a gale of dust blowing up from the dirt-track oval.
It coats our greasy French fries just as it did
back forty years when I came to this place with their father,
and much before, when I watched snarling cars
slide around an identical eighth-mile circuit.
Far south of here, that was, but the scene hasn’t changed,
unlike everything else, it appears, in the rest of my world.
Two bats flit over moth-clotted infield lights.
There used to be scores. I liken those vanished clouds
to my corps of friends, which seems to shrink by the hour.
Just this morning, another stab of bad news–
an old friend dying, one incredibly brave
through years of struggle with and after cancer.
He was the smallest but toughest boy on our football team
yet always tender toward others even back then.
Thinking of him, I can blame this dust for my tears.
With an elegy on hand for every occasion,
I wouldn’t need to fetch fresh metaphors
for any future bereavement or for solace.
My griefs, after all, are increasingly the same.
I’d try to devise some elegiac conclusion,
to offer the sense of completion these boys have known–
like their father before them and their father’s father as well–
those times when they bet on the battered car that would pass
the checkered flag into transitory triumph.
The grandsons, of course, lost more than they won tonight.
So just as for any imagined reader I’d honor
the elegiac custom of consolation,
for these little children I’ll offer some little comfort.
We’ll stop by the vendor’s stand where I can buy them
Bear Ridge caps and undented model cars.
Then, our races ended, we’ll head for the exit.
*
Sydney Lea is a Pulitzer finalist in poetry, founder of New England Review, Vermont Poet Laureate (2011-15), and recipient of his state’s highest artistic distinction, the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. He has published two novels (most recently Now Look, 2024), eight volumes of personal essays (most recently, Such Dancing as We Can, 2024), a hybrid mock epic with former Vermont Cartoonist Laureate James Kochalka called Wormboy (2020), and sixteen poetry collections (most recently What Shines, 2023). His new and selected poems is due in early 2027.
