We knew the place better than we knew our homes,
Each scratch and warped spot on the bar,
Each tear and repair in the old-school upholstery
On the ageless stools,
Each story behind the bats, jerseys, boxing gloves
And the other souvenirs whose origin and the stories behind them
(A man of the world, old Pop McLafferty would say of himself,
Though the only time he’d been outside Elk County
Was a desultory two-year hitch
Spent in one of Mother Army’s more decrepit West Texas camps)
All being  of dubious authenticity;
Take those gloves, Pop would say, Got ‘em in Cuba one time.
Belonged to Hemingway, ya know.
He and the old Dodger pitcher, Hugh Casey,
They’d spend all day shooting clay pigeons
And drinking cases of Hatuey Beer 'n go home
And beat the living hell out of each other with those gloves
Until Papa’s missus couldn’t take the splintered wicker no more,
And though we knew **** well he’d bought the gloves
At the Sally Army thrift store up in Coudersport,
We kept our own counsel,
As we’d bent elbows and spewed ******* there
Since we were old enough to drink
(Earlier, in fact, as we ran with Timmy McLafferty,
Who later inherited the place,
The largesse of death being the only way
He’d ever have the wherewithal to own a bar)
And the place remained a constant
Through all those things we’d failed or had failed us
(Girlfriends, wives, parents, even our spots on the line
Once the Montmorenci shut down.)

This night, then, was no different than most,
The normal rituals being observed,
Most of them at the good Timmy’s expense,
As his positions both behind the bar
And in the cosmic order mandated such,
This particular evening the determination having been made
By unanimous ballot that Timmy had never, in fact, been kissed
(Not as preposterous a notion as one might think,
As he had made the transition from “hefty” to “fat *******”
Quite some time ago.)
He’d taken our potshots with the good-natured stoicism
That were part and parcel of his character and his role,
Until he piped up—C’mon fellas, I was engaged at one point.
We’d responded with any number of speculative notions
As to said fiancée’s deficiencies and possible species,
Until Timmy said, with borderline belligerence,
Look, I’ll show you a picture,
At which point he produced a creased three-by-five snapshot
Of a blonde who looked very much like a 1980’s –issue Ellen Foley,
Thus occasioning speculative comparisons
Between Tommy and Meat Loaf,
With the subsequent rumination
As to what this poor girl would have tasted
Had she stuck her tongue down Tommy’s throat
In Paradise-By-The-Dashboard-Light fashion
(The consensus being Subway BLT, varied flavors of Cheetos,
And three-hour old Tullamore Dew.)
We’d expected, naturally, that Tommy would laugh along with us,
But he slammed a tray of glasses down on the bar with such force
That one or two of the glasses liberated themselves
And shattered noisily.
He’d gazed at us with the pure, holy fury
Which usually proceeds the mother of all riot acts,
But he apparently decided that there were pearls and swine
And there was no sense mixing the two.
Why should I waste any more time on you sonsofbitches,
Buncha ******* can’t see past the bottom of your glasses anyhow,
And with that he stalked into the back,
Ostensibly to grab mixers or pretzels
Or some **** thing, and we sat still as church mice for a moment,
Until someone looked at the TV, and said ******* Sixers,
All upside and never deliverin’ the goods,
and we nodded in agreement in the manner of those
Who do not see, hear, or say anything untoward.

These gatherings had become somewhat regular,
A short drive for most involved,
Having stayed behind once the mill closed
(There were the odd out-of-state license plates,
Mostly Florida and the Carolinas,
The vehicles' occupants sporting incongruous tans,
And they were treated with a certain reserve,
As if they had breached some faith,
Had broken some covenant)
And they were invariably in the morning,
Leading more than one wag to note
Well, at least we're all on first shift now.
And the talk outside of Wiegert's,
Shambling old funeral home a little more care-worn
With each generation of the family it fell to,
Turned to such things as Butchie's unusual good luck,
How he'd remained more or less unscathed by the mill,
Losing only the tip of a pinkie finger in a roller
(It was said that, back before the dining room
At the Montmorenci House
Had been converted into a tattoo studio,
You always shook hands with the left and right
To ensure a full set of ten fingers in the grip.)
And how he had, even though he was among
The most reticent of men, been a regular
At the retiree luncheons at the diner up in Wilcox
(The timing of such events subject to certain vagaries
As an infrequent February snow storm
Or the less uncommon changes in ownership)
And how he once explained his presence,
And then only when pressed,
By quietly noting Well, I figger my will-be's
To be a solitary thing, and the only folks
I share my used-ta-be's is all of you good people.

It was every bit a part of her as her fingers or her voice
(That being an instrument mostly unused now),
And it didn’t matter that she might be wearing stripes or checks,
Not that she spent a great deal of time fiddling with her clothes,
Preening herself in the mirror like some dried-up peacock,
Not that she’d done so at any stage of her life,
As that was for the vain:
Young girls justly so, or faded prom queens who,
Despite all evidence to the contrary,
Refused to accept the primacy of decay.

It’s not like I was never young, you know she would demur,
And, in fact, she had played along-- she’d gone to the dances,
Gossiped at the sleep-overs, tried her hardest to work up enthusiasm
During the pep rallies before the games against Ridgway or St. Mary’s,
Even allowing herself to be courted by a shy, gentle offensive tackle
Later lost in Korea, forgotten boy in a forgotten war,
But there was always something not quite right,
A certain air of fragility and impermanence,
(Even though the presence of the Montmorenci Mills,
Hulking solidity of brick and mortar and yelping machinery,
Cradled the town in its enduring embrace
And beyond town, endless hills encumbered with spruce and pine
So thick the forest floor never saw so much as a glimpse of daylight
Between December and mid-March)
A curious buzzing, droning and mosquito-like,
Saying in a persistent whisper Surely this can’t be all there is;
There must be something true, something fine,
Something enduring to hang one’s dreams upon.

She was right, certainly, on the larger point;
The mill closed, thrusting the town into a collective limbo
Where they couldn’t divorce themselves from a reality
Which no longer existed, and, as the years rolled diffidently onward,
Morphed into something that never truly was
(Meanwhile the woods, inexorable as some ancient, half-blind old bear,
Digesting the odd abandoned hunting camp or hobo’s lean-to,
Seemed to creep farther toward the main roads each year),
And each year brought fewer inquiries
As to her availability and amenability
Until her solitude was final, impenetrable;
Indeed, she never found reason to look back upon on those days
Where she could have been half of something,
Save for the several occasions when (for no reason she could fathom,
Which in itself perplexed her to no end)
She thought back to the time they visited the fortune teller
Who had a tent, the opening of which she watched nervous, hawklike
At the county fair over in Clearfield,
And the mystic had taken one look at her hand,
Tracing the palm mournfully
And said, in a voice shackled in an unspeakable sadness,
*Poor little thing, you’ll never see forty, I’m afraid.
I’ve never seen a lifeline that short.

Oh, we’d talked of other lives in other places,
But where would we have gone, anyway?
(It was rural Pennsylvania in the thirties,
And being well-off meant you ate three times most days
And could afford meat every other Sunday)
So we carried on in anguish and guilt as old-maids-in-waiting
As there were dinners to cook and cows to strip out,
Fireplaces to stoke, any number of chores to do
While our mothers and fathers waited patiently for that day
When we would, each in our turn, don a grandmother’s wedding gown
And march steadfastly down some acceptably Protestant aisle
While Gert Bauer, default church organist
Though she was past eighty and nearly blind,
Tortured the wedding march, flubbing notes and stomping pedals
The tune lurching forward at an inconsistent
And unusually adagio fashion.

As it turns out, Tojo and Adolph Schicklgruber
Interceded on our behalf,
For, as the young and able-bodied men of Elk County went off to serve
(Farm boys from Wilcox and Kersey, pool sharps from Ridgway,
Fully half the production line from the paper mill in Johnsonburg)
Someone needed to man punch presses and die casters,
So we were able to find work making propellers
In a windowless and airless factory
Which didn’t have women’s rooms
Until we’d been there for three months
Allowing us to set up house together
(We told our parents
It would allow us to save up toward our weddings,
And still let us give them grocery money each couple of weeks.)
Eventually, Johnny came marching home again
And back into his old job,
Which left us somewhat at sixes and sevens,
But, like Blanche DuBois,
We came to depend on the kindness of strangers
Who believed in the value
Of strong backs or the primacy of civil service scores
And so with our steady if unspectacular incomes,
We were able to carry on keeping house, as it was said,
(Our parents sadly unpacking hope chests.
Sullenly gifting us the linens
They’d purchased for our marital bed at Larson’s,
The hand-made quilt stitched and fussed over
For nine months by Aunt Jenny)
And maintain an uneasy truce with the good people of the town;
Indeed, we were all about “don’t ask, don’t tell”
Long before it was somewhat fashionable.

When it became apparent that she would not carry on much longer,
Or, as she put it, Now I’ve got an expiration date,
Just like a can of soup,
It was as if the populace had decided, after some sixty years,
To take their revenge upon our ******* of the natural order,
As if they were a pack of wolves,
Having identified the lame and the sick among a herd of whitetail,
Tightening the circle before moving in for the ****.  
In truth, I shouldn’t have been surprised,
But the pettiness and the tight, self-satisfied smirks
Were no less painful in spite of that.
And what was your relationship to the deceased?
They would say with their half-knowing, half-offended smiles.
I’d wanted to shout at the top of my lungs that for fully six decades
She had been the love of my life,
Without question and without deviation,
Not like the banker who dallied with his fat secretary,
Or the claims rep who, taking a personal day when her pipes froze up,
******* the plumber right on the kitchen floor,
But years of secrecy and compromise exact a toll,
So I simply, quietly, matter-of-factly would reply
I am the executrix, thank you.

We had talked of perhaps heading west
To make honest women out of each other,
And, later still, of burying her in Paris or San Francisco,
But tight times and walkers and wheelchairs
Made such plans unworkable;
It’s only parchment and granite, she said,
What do they mean at the end of the day, anyhow,
And so when the time came
She asked me to take her ashes up to the top of Bootjack Hill
And scatter her to the wind.
Make sure to go all the way to the top, she insisted,
*I want to get good and clear of this place.

He is the sort who seems well cast
As the Grim Reaper’s right-hand man:
Hulking, deliberative in movement and thought alike,
Generally doing the heavy lifting of the direct route to the afterlife
With a grim solemnity not shared by the funeral directors
In whose service he lifts, wrangles, and grunts
(They are, to be fair, not the black-hatted, pale-complected ghouls
Littering Dickensian tales or Monty Python sketches;
They are businessman, Rotarians, purveyors of cheerful websites
And nine-year-old giggle-worthy sponsorships of Little League teams)
Performing his duties wordlessly, monotonously
Sparing no time for idle chat or frivolity
(Though on one occasion, when Lew Jackson from over in St. Mary’s
Brought in a women that he’d known as a girl,
A girl who had found time under the bleachers for everyone but him,
And had turned that gift into two stories of gabled comfort
Plus a membership at the Elk County Country Club;
He’d looked at the box and sighed Well, this is a bit of a surprise.
I’d always had her burnin’ up somewhere else.)

Crematory Lenny is a fisherman, his normal haunts
Some shady bank on the Clarion’s East Branch,
Or one of the sturdier railroad trestles just outside town
(The trains not having run through Montmorenci Falls in his memory)
Though if there is a Sunday where his ministrations are not required,
He will drive up to the Kinzua Dam,
Sometimes eschewing pole and tackle altogether,
Choosing to simply wade into the silence of the reservoir.
He is strictly a catch-and-release fisherman,
Even returning sunnys and chubs best simply thrown on the creekside
(Good stream management and all that)
Back to the water, freely admitting that, in culinary terms,
Perch, trout, and bass are simply take-it-or-leave-it propositions.
Sometimes, though, he will foul hook one,
Or come upon some fish deeply scarred or tumor-ridden,
And he will reach into coat or pants pocket
To remove the garden ***** he never travels without,
Proceeding to dig a small hole, just so wide and so deep,
To serve as a final piscine resting place.
He would not, indeed could not, begin to explain
The whys and wherefores of these internments,
Being a virtual Caiban if matters stray from the weather and shop-talk,
Nor does he pause to ruminate upon the dearly departed,
Simply casting once more in stealth and silence,
With no sound save the whizzing whisper of the drag, the brief plop
As the lure breaks the surface.

The pin wobbled in a manner which would tantalize another man,
But he knew, surely as he knew his own name,
Knew in the very maw of his soul,
That it would remain implacably upright.
He was right, of course, the seven-pin standing ***** as a toy soldier
In complete defiance of tenets of physics and divine mercy.
He’d been down this road before,
More times than he’d care to remember:
Some occasions of his own making, short-arming the last ball,
Having it hit the head pin too flush,
Or going Brooklyn and leaving the ten unscathed,
But equally often seemingly the victim of random fate or its like,
Where he’d the pocket just so,
With all the action you’d need or could muster,
Yet somehow the pins would bounce off the wall in patterns
Inexplicable via Newton's laws, the work of gremlins or voodoo,
Perhaps the vexatious ghost of some manual pin-setter of long ago.
He’d put together eleven straight strikes
On every lane in the house a half-dozen times,
Some nights when the boards were as giving
As a rich and doting grandmother,
Other times in sport conditions
Where no one else even sniffed two hundred
(On one such evening, he’d scored a perfect game
On the ancient shuffle-alley game tucked into a corner of the bar, Celebrating, in a manner of speaking,
By taking chunky, sad-faced Penny Marie
From the payroll office at the mill
Up against a wall in the dimly-lit alley behind the building.)

After enduring the usual consolation and confabulation,
He left the alley, walking up the hill to the old two-story on Fifth St.
Which he shared with his mother and other memories,
Though the house bore little trace of his existence, present or otherwise
(His mother had, just once, put a few of his trophies and plaques
Out on display on the mantelpiece in the parlor;
He’d insisted that she take them down forthwith.
Buncha ******* plastic and stamped tin, he’d snapped,
Don’t mean a ******* thing to no ******* body.)
He’d nodded to her on his way through to his room
(She still, out of force of habit, still waited up for him,
Part simple inertia, part hopeful belief
In the talismanic nature of the maternal)
Grunting Y’know, one of those nights in reply to her inquiry
As to how well or otherwise the evening went.
He’d undergone the usual bedtime ministrations
(An indifferent ****, the near-frenzied tooth brushing
Which failed to remove the effluvium which accompanied him home
Courtesy of bad bar pizza and Rolling Rock)
Before another evening of fitful dreams
Consisting of hazy yet glorious episodes
Which never seemed to reach fruition before the advent
Of an unwelcome and vaguely malevolent sunrise.

Well, why not me, I reasoned
(No surprise to friends and loved ones,
As I have always considered my time
On this spinning patch of rock
As something of a monument to the value of pragmatism)
But there were still the normal sine-wave vacillation
Between tenuous optimism and odds-driven grim reality,
Fanciful discussions of Chinese herbs and Mexican clinics
And, later still, of time frames and stock transfers,
All the while various folks attired in suits and clinic coats
Debating matters pertaining to the coda of my personal symphony
(Doing so as if yours truly wasn’t even in the room)
Until, deciding my input might be somewhat pertinent, I said
If it’s all the same to you, I would like to go home.

It was, in a sense, like getting back on an old Schwinn
(Fender dented, rubbing on the front tire just the least little bit,
The chain needing oil, grudgingly giving in
To the demands of the crank)
Sitting, unused but inordinately patient, next to the barn,
The whole notion of settling back into a pace you’d forgotten,
Like dialing back a metronome from allegro to andante
Without missing a beat or flubbing a note.
What’s more, there were the sensations you’d never made time for
While under the thumb of daily deadlines and train schedules,
Greeting you like friends you hadn’t seen for twenty years
But started gabbing with as easy as slipping on old jeans:
The scent of the lilacs, overpowering but borderline mystical,
The informal yet precise ballet of the cattails and jewelweed,
The fields of cows that, even though you know it can’t be the case,
Are populated by the same Bessie and Bossie
You taunted and pelted with watermelon as a child
(I have made it a point to proffer my apologies),
The dark, pine-choked hills,
Formidable but accessible, even comforting.
Sometimes, when I am not paying attention,
I catch myself all but tearing up,
And I say to myself, ever so softly,
As not to disturb the squirrels and the wrens,
I had almost forgotten.  Christ forgive me,
I had almost forgotten.


I’d assumed (sometimes, I can be astounded
At the full extent of my own foolishness)
That she would merely take a leave of absence;
She has, after all, an alphabet full of advanced degrees,
A rainmaker’s reputation and the billable hours to match.
Columbia and Harvard Law, after all,
But she grew up down the road just a piece in Ebensburg,
So this is all part and parcel of her as well
Hard coded in the DNA for better or worse, she’ll say,
All the while shaking her head and laughing softly.
Surely you don’t want to stay here, I’ll say,
Boorishly rational in the face of everything
Which would argue to be otherwise,
You’ve read enough Forbes and Fortune;
Altoona is dead, Johnstown is dying,
And she allows that, for a time, coming back
Was the source of some misapprehension on her part,
Until it dawned on her that on those rare occasions
It had occurred to her to glance skyward in mid-town,
She had seen faceless tiles of windows
Sufficient to sheet a Great Pyramid,
An Armageddon’s worth of angels and gargoyles in the cornices,
But she had not, even once, ever seen the stars.