A lament by Connecticut's poet laureate about his village grocery store may have lost the store. ``November Ode,'' a poem by James Merrill, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, has won him some admirers in the old center of this eastern Connecticut community, but also the animosity of the grocer and others who found his portrayal unfair. Merrill said his work was, in many ways, a generalized commentary on how community life everywhere has declined with the disappearance of small neighborhood stores and shops. While several people called him to say how the poem ``expressed their own feelings'' about life in Stonington, Merrill said the controversy has left him ``wondering if I shouldn't go back to incomprehensibility, which I have been accused of.'' To those who live in Stonington borough, which has fewer than 3,000 residents, there is no mistaking the ``dear dim local grocery'' mentioned unflatteringly in the poem. It is Roland's Market, the borough's last grocery. There are also other references to life in the borough, which was established in 1752 and is part of the town. Once a fishing village and major port, its late 18th- and early 19th-century homes and shops have been rehabilitated and there are a number of antique stores for visitors. Ronald Albamonti, 39, is the first to admit that life is changing in the borough, and that at the market, ``things just haven't been the same'' since his father, Roland, died last year and he took over. But he said he was deeply hurt by Merrill's poem, which he views as a personal attack. The poem reads, in part: ``The son picked to succeed him never lived up to the seigneurial old man. Yet his clientele kept brightly toeing the line of least resistance, taking with a grain of salt (Aisle 3) all talk of heavy drugs and light women, closing Republican eyes to dead mouse and decimated shelves, the padded statement ...'' With three large supermarkets within 12 miles of the borough, Albamonti said he decided to make Roland's more like a deli than a full-service grocery. The poem was the final straw for Albamonti. Gauging that the public generally shared the sentiments expressed by Merrill, Albamonti said he reached a tenative agreement this week to sell the business and the property. If the store is closed and the two-story building used for another purpose, Merrill's poem, written a year ago and published last month in The New York Review of Books, will have proven itself to be prophetic: ``Plainer than day was how, next summer, this prime square footage would be developed in the usual way.'' Merrill, who lives only two blocks from Roland's Market but hasn't been back to the store since the poem controversy erupted, moved to Stonington from New York City in the 1950s, partly to be part of a small community. At Keane's newstand a block from Roland's Market, Francis Keane, 78, who has been selling newspapers in the borough for 50 years, said some customers thought Merrill had been unfair in his criticism of Ronald Albamonti. At the same time, he said he agreed Merrill was right when he spoke of the decline of community life. ``It was a reflection of what is happening in small towns. It is a different environment now. Years ago everybody was more friendly and stayed in town. Now they come here just to sleep and eat and then go off in their cars to work,'' he said.
