valley antpeople

in 1958 a family of five/one infant two toddlers/and a heart-tuggingly young couple/moved from the Los Angeles megalopolis/to arizona’s valley of the sun/and bought a house that hadn’t quite been built yet/with saplings in front yard and back/and a floor plan identical or mirror-imaged/to thousands of those that would surround them

dirt roads got graded/old barns torn down/and concrete and asphalt were poured across an expanse/of former farmland

it was called the baby boom/and it made housing developer john f. long his fortune

aerial photography over midvalley over this fervent time/showed the valley residences spreading like a fungus/or an aboveground ant colony/growing everywhere but especially west

phoenix population more than doubled/glendale’s went up by an order of magnitude/and peoria and buckeye and avondale and points west o my

and we made stuff up as we went along/not as blazingly as the pioneers of a century back/but valiantly enough here and there

it doesn’t quite feel like history when you live it/but looking back/at all the violence and miracle and new language/wow