When you wash an octopus
the water becomes an octopus.

When you boil an octopus
the steam twists into tentacles.

When you cover the mirrors,
the octopi come alive.

When you crack open a window
don’t they all escape?

Samphire makes a long journey
from cephalopod to plant.

The stigmata in my hands--
shaped like baby octopuses.

How many times
have I died for my young?

How many limbs
have I regenerated?

How often have I used ink
in my own defence?

How much blue blood must spill
to save the world?

How many hearts do you need
to survive through our losses?

Blood-dark days and lilies in bloom,
the knife, the gun, the operatic end—
all goodfellas and grandfathers,
all godfathers and millionaires
at yet another Sicilian funeral.

I was young and arrogant,
I dared to walk behind a Mafia boss.
I could have taken the long way
around the circle of captains he sat among,
but I didn’t—he felt my presence.    
He turned, slow, deliberate.
The look he cast my way
haunts me to this very day.

It was as if the dead man’s eyes
opened in the boss’s stare,
and I was staring at a cold, dead soul,
staring back at me,
and at another funeral—my own.

Every time we went to his barber supply shop,
he’d ruffle my hair
and say, “hi kid, how ya doin'?”
He knew my father from Sicily.
They went to the same school together,
but after the war, my father became a barber,
and he became a mobster.
He was friendly with dad,
like childhood friends often are.
They’d joke in dialect and laugh.

It wasn’t until later
that I learned who he was,
his businesses were fronts
for covers and covers for fronts.
Anyway, what did I care. I was a kid.

And that was the rub.
Under the RICO Act
I was “guilty by association.”

At ten I turned myself in,
but I never snitched,
and I’m still serving time
in the garden of good and evil.

Another time—young, handsome,
and likely high on laced grass,
at a Sicilian wedding anniversary,
I asked a beautiful mob wife to dance,
and flirted with her on the floor.

Right away, my father drove me home.
“I’m saving you the beating
of a lifetime. Sleep it off.
In the morning, you apologize.”

I couldn’t believe how messed up I was—
the drugs, the homemade wine,
full of amorous traces from the earth,
and the woman’s smouldering beauty.

When I apologized the next day,
I saw bullets in her husband’s guns—
but in his wife’s dark eyes—
a trace of arousal, a flicker of regret.

Tell me where Jimmy Hoffa is.
Long as I can remember,
he’s been buried in my psyche.
Long as I can recall,
he’s been hidden in my memory.
America, I don’t recognize you.
All your money belongs to the rich,
and decent folk are a thing of the past.
Is Jimmy Hoffa in the air or the earth?
Was he incinerated,
scattered everywhere and nowhere
both at once and neither?
Is he buried under a building or freeway?
Perhaps at the bottom of a lake?
Crushed in some wrecking yard?
All the stories are true.
All the stories are false.
All the people talking are liars.
All the liars are telling the truth.

My cousin Joe was a simple man,
But he was also a man of the earth,
Which meant he was deeper than most.
In the final weeks of my father’s agonizing death
From stomach cancer, Joe came to visit
To say his last goodbyes.
My father, after yet another seizure,
Was sleeping somewhere near his death.

How many seizures can you bear
Before you reach for those Dilaudids
Prescribed to your father,
To numb your own pain?
How many episodes can you endure
Before you wish for death to take him—
How many words can you cling to,
Before they all sound false.

Outside, Joe sat beside me,
Sensing I had reached my emotional end,
He said nothing at first,
But the silence felt like an answer.
Then, quietly, he spoke
About how he grows his potatoes
And why he has such a big yield.
How deep he dug his holes,
How he covered the root potatoes
In loose sand, not soil,
Giving them space to grow,
Waiting for the flowers to bloom and fall.
I clung to every word
Like it was some holy truth,
And in that quiet moment,
He placed his hand on my shoulder
And said, "Come on, let’s go back inside."

At the grassy margins of the marsh,
The reflections held the child’s gaze.
He opened his eyes,
To the vastness of the marsh,
And the watershed beyond it.
As sunset touched the distant trees,
His father said, "Anything could bite."
The water deepened to purple and green,
And stillness held a thousand reflections
In which the child was almost lost.
With reeds swaying in every direction,
The marsh began to seethe with sound.
Before nightfall, his father warned,
It would soon be time to wrap it up,
Watching his son with a smile,
As the child cast his line
Into the unknown, for the first time.