As I get older I don’t dread death coming closer.
It is closer.
It will come as a newborn:
seeding so long in me,
that I would chide it for taking its time.
I will not scream when it head comes out my body.
I won’t even be amused by such a Hollywood trick.
And when its held before my eyes
trickling with all my blood
I will simply reach out and hold it close
to my chest,
run my fingers over its head
until it stops wailing,
grows silent-
and there is nothing left for me to say to it,
nothing left to do
but  kiss this  life of mine,
shed a joyful yet mournful tear
and wait for it and myself
to fall asleep.

After forty years the brownstones
still seemed the same except
for the newer cars and the people
in fashionable clothes walking
golden dogs in chic comfort vests,
all living in houses he couldn’t afford.

He couldn’t believe he grew up here
when the streets were lively
with black live matter
and Gerald every summer
out there  with his roller
painting fatsfix’s store front red.

Now there sits Wray’s fancy drink café,
his name in a stylish white font
outcropping from a charcoal awning,
a cocktail glass replacing the Y, a large
BLACKLIVESMATTER banner out front,
proudly put there by its white owner.

The old El Diamantet is now
Castro’s Authentic Mexican Cuisine  
sharing space with a Dunkin’ Donuts
with expensive bicycles racked
to the declining handicap ramp.
The Mobil on Fuller- a Citgo Market.

The Meats and Greens turned Bamboo’s
and the farmacia now just  a pharmacy,
and the biggest insult of them all,
New Murken’s Restaurant which
served the best corn-beef sandwhiches
is an “eat big, leave happy” Mega  Bites.

The homebuds  had split, vanished
to memories of stinging high fives,
basketball jams and feeling up
Zoe on a fine Friday night,  the smell
of her  lingering in forty years  of regret.
There’ll be no bros coming from  these doors.

His heart  felt the sting of going home to a home
that was no longer his and no longer wanted him.
That past was a meat offering to this new block-
as if his blood and flesh had been scrubbed away
in the white wash of neatly trimmed roses behind
spiked  fences-  as if that there of his never happened.

“What was here before we came?” he imagined
the children asking the parents behind the doors.
“Nothing of note,” they would reply using the
same line the real estate agent routinely recited
to anyone who inquired about what existed
before the abattoir came and moved  on.

I  play with the sand,
crush it to a globe of
sun dried golden particles,

until the thing in me
that is the ocean calls to
release it to the tide

so full of  the incessant
sorrow  upon sorrow of other’s  tears
forced daily to kiss the shore-

its roar constantly reminding me-
the ocean hates the land-
the ocean does not love the land.

He lacked the skill to make it true, the crib,
so he  assembled it from a wordless diagram,
an ark of 5 panels, 32 screws and bolts, 3 tools-
tightening it just enough, until the memory
of its creation fixed solid in his soul, well past
the 1000 days of the child dreaming in it,  
the 30 years of lying unassembled in attic dust,
its existence cradled, tightened and retightened,
in lullaby and bedtime rhyme- until the child
reached his Jesus year, and needing a
second-hand cradle for his soon to be first born,
noticed it in the growing dawn and dust and
thought “Dad, I know I have the screws for that.”

My mother was always a better singer
                                than she was a cook.

She may have burnt a lot of things but
                              never missed a note,
         especially when Harry Belafonte
came on the transistor kitchen radio-
a voice so pure it made her cry with joy.

“There’s a hole in the bucket dear Liza,
                                                     dear Liza,”
                         he sang echoing her past,
                                                 the divorce,
                         her humbling present life.

The duet had the reply she wanted to say
to everything and sing it like Odetta--
                             “Well fix it, dear Henry
                                                 dear Henry,
                                                          fix it.”

It was her kitchen cooking song and
           and we would sing it together
            when Harry wasn’t on the air.

We sang it so often,
                                  switching voices.
                                      that I believed
                         she could fix anything
                                     and I could too.    

When we got to the fortieth line
                the meatloaf was burnt
                                              on top.

I ate it all with a lot of ketchup.
She just cut off the burnt part
                and fed it to the dog.

My sister,
                             two brothers
                              and stepdad
                             ate it quietly,
                        building up a lot
                                         of bad
                 meatloaf memories.

All the other kids had
                          their own songs
                that she sang to them
                                but she sang
                                               only
                         Belafonte to me.  

“Daylight come and me wan' go home,”
                    she sang to me in a whisper
                   before kissing me goodnight.

Calypso more than Salsa echoed
                            her Boricua pride,
                 the youngest of thirteen,
            yet never born to the island.

“Midnight come  and she wan’ go home,”
I sang to her open casket 22 years later,
                              kissing her on the head,
                      taking the hole in the bucket,
                                     along with Belafonte
                                                   to the future.

The drought has made July linger.  The air smells of sewer *****, sweetgum, sassafras, fescue, concrete and asphalt.  

On this long summer day when the light and heat decide to linger— parents let their children play well into the night on the community’s green.  

Their laughter and the croaking of frogs in the rention pond, just beyond, overgrown with cattails,
has my dog thinking the sound of fireworks and wanting to go back home.  I see the flickerings of the early late night news peeping through the half-drawn curtains as we head back.  

I imagine the children dreaming dream after dream in the hot mist of sleep after the last door has shut.


In that moment I see the first lines of my new poem, full  of that living hurting nostalgia that everyone likes to star and comment on— a poem, that I imagine, might be found after my death by my executor.  It would be one of those critically disdained viral odes charming and popular enough to be embroidered on sofa pillows that comfort the aching backside of old widows. A poem with a hint of despair but not written in despair.   One that knows the substance of July summer nights.

The pond was a quarry first,
a blast furnace to the colonies
where trains ran across its field.
“Iron Ore Bed” map points called it.
It was left to the rain when it dried up.

When his parents bought the land
twenty- five years before he was born,
the field was overgrown and the pond
was weedy and inaccessible.

Over the next few decades,
they cleared the area all around it,
diverted a nearby brook
to flow through it.  
It became the center of their life.

It was sixty feet deep with water
that was clear and warm.
It teamed with small trout, pickerel
and bass, shoals of gentleness that
passed by him and his cousins as they swam.  

Great blue herons, snowy egrets
would feast their briefly before
their Souh American migration,
always mindful of the need
for even quick hellos and goodbyes.

In his presence they would dip their wings
and then rise majestically over the pond
above the beech, birch and ash,
vanishing from his sight, beyond the horizon.

And then, always the rain would come,
the pond shimmering in the downpour
washing the pond mud and silt
from his arms and legs, the last
streaks of it from his hair.  

Afraid he would be struck by lightning,
he retreated to the screened in porch,
with everyone, out of the rain, playing
Monopoly in the coming firefly night.