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Scott Ruescher is the author of Waiting for the Light to Change, a collection of poems published by Prolific Press in 2017, and the winner of annual prizes from Able Muse, Poetry Quarterly, and the New England Poetry Club. This is his second contribution to Lyrical Somerville.

In the Stately Greek Revival Architectural Style

Scott Ruescher.

Up steep Clay Street, perpendicular to the main drag

On the south side of downtown, jogging in the general

Direction of the battleground at the Vicksburg National

Military Park, site of the Union’s decisive blockade

Of supplies that would have kept the Confederates in power

On the Mississippi River, I found myself passing

Two solid blocks of comfortable mansions built

In the stately Greek Revival architectural style

Popular among the ruling classes of the antebellum South

If also responsible for the building we inhabit

On a corner here in Cambridge, one of the capitals

Of the abolitionist cause, that we have reason to believe

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, leader of the moralist

Poets of the Fireside, might actually have visited

(Long before it turned from a duplex to a triplex

To accommodate the office of a neighborhood physician)

When the painter Washington Allston, an 1800

Graduate of Harvard, looking for the inspiration he’d found

As an out-of-state student from a Carolina rice plantation,

Was living out the final thirteen years of his life

In a studio across the street from us, where brick townhouses

Collectively known as Allston Terrace sit, after making it big

For twenty years in England, partly for that portrait

Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge that you see on the cover

Of the first of two volumes of Holmes’s definitive

Biography of him, but also for the grand romantic pictures

Of Biblical proportion, some of them among the first

Paintings collected by Brahmins for the MFA in Boston,

And others still on view at the Boston Athenaeum, too,

That would have been suitable for framing as well

On the walls of the mansions on either side of Clay Street

That were spared from shelling by Union gunboats parked

In the river below the bluff, according to the taciturn

Travel guide I was reading, when Grant learned

That the wealthiest civilians, albeit those who profited most

From the slavery system, were hiding underneath them

In furnished bunkers, and pardoned them from additional

Shelling, even though they were keeping, along

With their jewels, their cookery, their silver, their linens,

And their substandard imitations of Allston paintings,

The servants, the slaves, the shackled human beings

Who might have been cousins of the black descendants,

For all they knew, who worked a few hundred miles

East of Vicksburg, near the coast, on the Allston plantation

That—or so I’ve gathered from online searches since my return—

Is currently being subdivided for luxury condominiums.

— Scott Ruescher

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