While I was enjoying the trip
My friend was inconsolable
For all the two-timing he’d done
To his beautiful fiance.

At my brother’s lakeside house
The lake was acid-trip frozen.
The crest of every wave remained
Exactly where it crested.  

I looked over at my friend
Who was now sleeping.
I was too far into being to sleep.
I was eternal and living it, in the moment.

One time my father was getting hassled
by some wiseguy from Detroit,
but all dad had to do was make a phone call,
and the young, dumb wiseguy
was chastised for hassling an old friend.
And I still have that secret little phone book
of numbers—those numbers—even though all of them are dead.
Maybe if I have to, I can call them all in hell.

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.