I first heard this read by Dr. Mary Brown back about the time that the last Horn and Hardart’s closed its doors in 1991. I was attending Indiana Wesleyan University in Marion Indiana, having just changed my focus of study from theology to education and literature. Dr. Brown, I think your reading of this was better than mine, but please accept this tribute to the profound influence you had on my reading and understanding of American poetry.
I am not sure how the snow figures into the idea of wind and matches in a dry forest “about to go,” but then maybe I am thinking too much with my head and not enough with my imagination. There are parts of this poem which work like an impressionistic painting, more about feeling than about thought. There is a sense of isolation and desolation in a snow swept landscape, dry and barren, like the end of an age.
One needn’t know about the details of how the the waiter-less automat diner met its demise, done in by changing life styles of American diners and the rising popularity of fast food chains, in order to understand the emotions in this poem, but if it interests you, you can read a bit of Horn and Hardart’s history in the Smithsonian Magazine here:
It is enough to feel the ruminations of the poet here that are not quite nostalgia. There is a reverent sense of loss, but not a wallowing exactly. At the very least, the speaker of the poem is aware of how his “carefully blowing smoke into the ceiling” is a bit overdone. There is resolution here too, and a conviction that every experience in life is useful.