In the beginning, Black Bill dressed like my grandfather,
Like a simple man from the provinces,
Which made the story my family would tell
Over and over all the more engaging,
About how Black Bill bought his mansion
In Grosse Pointe, Michigan.
When the builder dismissed him as a peasant,
He pulled out a large down payment in cash,
Leaving the builder blinking at that fat *** of bills.
That was how they interpreted the American dream.
It didn’t matter how you got there, only that you did.

They went to the same schools,
Lived in the same neighbourhoods,
From the same small towns
In la provincia di Palermo.
Often they were distant relations
And cumpari from the old country.
My mother would say
“Jimmy Q was such a nice man,”
When the Feds said different,
And my grandfather
Would hug someone called Black Bill.
My father treated them respectfully
And they reciprocated.
They respect a respectful person
Because it shows indifference
To their business practices.
And now, with time, I’ve learned,
That guilty by association
You keep your mouth shut,
Wait until all are gone
And write poems about them
Like legends of their time.

When I was a kid,
We drove past
One of those endless Michigan cemeteries,
And my uncle caught me staring,
Maybe with more fear
In my face than necessary.

In his gravelly, wiseguy voice, he said,
“It’s not the dead you need to fear,
It’s the living.”

After that,
I never feared the dead,
And I never trusted the living again,
Especially him.

The older guys knew what to do:
dig a deep bed
and bury the coals under sand.
A survival tactic
they’d learned somewhere.

On that freezing night by the lake,
no one talked much,
just the crackle of cooling embers
and the weight of breath in the cold air.

I remember the heat on my back,
like the sun was buried under me
and our blankets were made of myriad stars.
We survived till morning
and followed the frost to the tracks.

may depress,
but I see it as the tree of winter
shedding its last leaves.

If it’s cold,
it’s only because winter
has paused over us,
resting without a coat.

If it’s grey,
it’s only because winter
hasn’t slept in days—
his face gone ashen.

Intellectually,
I’m indifferent to vicissitudes,
but my body feels the changes—
my body is the weak point.

I compensate—
growing leaves and poems
on my limbs,
that the spirit might carry
into Spring
what the body can’t.

Bread flour on the table
on my hands
over my mother’s apron

She'd dab some dough on my nose
and we’d both laugh

When she shook the flour
from her apron
an angel hovered in the air

When the loaves
went into the oven
it was like mother heat
and warmth
shaping the dough

That first taste
was the bread of life
the last taste
will be the bread of life

Why do I love Rachmaninoff’s Vocalise so much?
What has happened to me,
Overnight I’ve become an old man who weeps
For a song without words.
Is it because I’ve known the past,
Or because I know the future—
And that is a bitter knowledge to possess,
To know we will ****** each other again,
And that nothing changes
Across landscapes of madness.
Another Vocalise will have to be written,
And another me will have to suffer
The sadness of knowing,
Of hating who we are,
And of what we’re capable—
After all, there’s something tragic about music
If it exists to heal the wounds
That we ourselves inflict.