Not much happens in these parts, he would demur,
As if he’d be asked in the first place,
He one of the dwindling few remaining in this dwindling town.
Nevertheless, he has seen his share in four score and change years
From the vantage point of his place
Which sits just off the corner of the Penoyer Road:
Boom times and bust,
Snowdrifts threatening to lick the roof lines of houses,
Boys running through the embers of fallen leaves,
Shirtless and barefoot on improbably warm October days,
Young men in hay wagons and rattle-*** Chevy pickups
Laughing and singing, confident and carefree,
Making their way to the old train depot down at Apulia Station
First step on their way to show the jerries or the VC
Exactly how Upstate farm boys took care of business,
Windows adorned by placards with a gold star
Illuminated by a solitary light bulb at odd hours.
Here and there, younger types have begun to dot the landscape:
Professors with a romantic hankering to get back to the land,
Neo-hippies with their own reasons for embracing the rural life,
Each in their tune walking about their yards
Holding keyboarded and wi-fied replicas
Of that which Moses carried down the mountain,
Their fixer-uppers or double-wides adorned with small dishes
Pointed forlornly at the horizon in search of some satellite supplication.
While he has seen enough not to be too ******* sure about things,
He suspects that complexity and contentment
Rarely walk hand-in-hand,
So he keeps his needs simple enough
To be met by the ancient radio
(Huge, wood-cabineted shambling thing,
More attuned for Amos and Andy than All Things Considered)
The three-checkout grocery in Tully,
The Morton-building sheltered family practice over in Cazenovia
(The squalid, sooty skyline of Syracuse,
Split by six lanes of high-octane madness,
As remote and slightly terrifying to him as Mars itself)
As he has learned enough from thickets of trees
Which all but shriek with torrents of crows in September dusks,
The subtle changes of stream banks
Tinged by the stubbornness of frost on early May mornings
Or blanketed by the pig-iron forge heat of July afternoons,
To know that there are sufficient and possibly necessary limits
To the places where two legs or four wheels can carry a body.

It would be inaccurate, indeed downright unfair,
To label her as a convenience,
Certainly no matter of being any port in a storm;
She fell into that category of handsome women,
Tending more to the Rubenesque than the runway,
And those occasions where an evening with the gang
Fragmented into a somewhat unmatched set
Were more in line with settling into a familiar harbor,
Bereft of the intoxicating hazards of shoals and sand bars, perhaps,
But comfortable with a certain steadfastness about it,
A pleasant haven from the riptides, undertows,
And various entanglements of the open water.

It was an aneurysm that took her, the type of thing
We’d associated with grandparents, aged aunts,
Corpulent colleagues of our fathers.
What’s more, it turned she was staunchly and stubbornly Lutheran,
Regular to the point of obsession in her attendance at services
(We’d no way of knowing such a thing, of course,
The notion of staying overnight at her place
To rise from last night’s sheets at mid-morning
And share a table for omelettes and awkward chit-chat
Being both curious and curiosity)
So we arrayed ourselves in stiff collars,
Accompanied by ties we’d hoped to be suitable,
As the whole affair had us a bit off balance,
And we were only able to restore our equilibrium at the end,
Just in time to attempt to bounce pebbles onto her coffin lid
In what he hoped was some witticism in Morse code.

My Dearest Capulet,

As I write you in these waning hours
(The number of my sunrises and sunsets finite,
Easily counted upon either hand)
I do so resigned to the certainty
That this missive shall remain unanswered,
Most likely forever unread--but tell me, dear lady
To whom else would I address this correspondence,
For who else is more likely to understand
That love and hate are not opposite poles,
But are as the hissing, slathering jaws
Of that dreadful two-headed snake,
Which, if not separated by a prudent interval,
Will consume the other and then itself.
I have lived and learned this quite well
(At the hands of teachers and other lesser men)
And pondered other questions of fatality and fidelity,
Surmising that rings of gold and fetters of iron
Are neither necessary nor sufficient.

If I have not come to peace with my fortune, distant soul mate,
I have at least procured a measure of acquiescence,
For I have known love and hate and death,
Known them thoroughly enough to comprehend
That they are not wholly separate entities,
And that they will often appear at one’s door
Wearing the formal attire of one of the others.
I have burned, brightly if not in illumination,
And now I am spent, a charred celestial body
Rotating ever more slowly
Until a final, silent, unobserved obsolescence,
For after we have loved profoundly if not well,
What is left to us but the sepulcher?

I remain faithfully yours,

It’s perfect nonsense to suggest that, whether venal or mortal,
It would announce itself with fanfare and hullabaloo,
All but taking out a three-column ad in the trades
To trumpet its arrival.
Its métier has always been the dimly-lit corner,
The whispered admonition,
The ****** room in a somewhat undesirable neighborhood,
And while it is certain that it accompanied us
As we emerged, still scaly and seaweed strewn, from the sea,
It did so on a light unsullied by moonlight,
Surfacing silently with the least desirable of piscine attributes in tow.

The clouds have piled up to the west once again,
Grave and solemn as ancient, inscrutable judges
As they roll off the lake out toward Buffalo,
Odd ciphering of dots and dashes
Camouflaged in the heat lightning,
The key to its code beyond our ken
(Though we suspect the message is straightforward enough:
No rain for your beans and sorghum tonight.)
We are steadfast in our belief that rain will come,
Indeed, that it must come, if for no more reason
Than our fathers believed it would come,
And their fathers before them as well,
No matter that it was a simpler time then,
And confidence and conviction simpler as well:
No maze of subsidy and acronym to navigate,
No peppers from Argentina, no corn from DuPont.

We have seen the grain markets roller-coaster and ricochet,
The price per hundredweight of milk crash in a manner
Which sent our citified ancestors strolling off window ledges,
And yet we continue (aided and abetted by the bank,
The co-op, the seed company, each of whom also knows
Exactly what the denouement entails)
The inexorable cycle of madness:
Plow, plant, harvest, then winters of regret
Until it is time to plow and plant again,
Each year the liquid manure smelling a bit more acrid,
Like there was some Gomorrah smoldering under the surface,
Its inhabitants blind, soulless, cackling at us
With something that may as well be malice.

How to carry on, then?
Surely we could not be blamed
If we rent our garments and rolled madly in the dust,
Cursing God or jabbering in tongues,
But that is not our way, has never been our way,
And so we face one more cold snap that takes the tottering lambs,
One more inconvenient frost which threatens the apples and grapes,
With antique stoicism and grimly set jaws
As we stare at one more darkening sky,
The thunder in the distance
All but issuing a mocking challenge to our fidelity,
In wait for some moisture, some meteorological baptism
That is far from certain to come.
It’s what leads us to faith,
So those who reside in the pulpits tell us,
Ascetic men who tip-toe through the barnyards and pastures
As though the cowflops were landmines,
But we could tell them that faith is no blank check
Which awaits us at the end of days,
But rather the grim and desperate struggle
To force our gods and demons into a box
And somehow secure the lid
As we simply try to ride it all down just one more ******* day.

(I hate poets.
They annoy me deeply.)

I.

There are the balladeers,
Working in service of their inner Service,
(Though, despite the seeming impossibility,
Their hackneyed verse is even worse)
Creating tortuous rhyme
Which slows down labyrinthine narratives
Ending up in some deus ex machine
So implausible that it would make Euripides blush
(Most often courtesy of some unforeseen projectile
Or sudden viral contagion;
Would that their creators meet such a fate!)

II.

I come not to praise the so-called sonneteers,
But to bury them.
They are an earnest lot,
(Lord knows that they are earnest)
And they will make their fourteen lines rhyme
(Though sometimes the rhyme scheme screams for mercy)
And hang the cost.
Though their narratives are head-scratching things,
And their iambs proceed with the steadiness
Of a nonagenarian church pianist
Doing her damndest to fight the wedding march to a draw,
They are content, nay, proud of their work
Because babble rhymes with Scrabble
(Though they are not particularly proficient with the latter,
They have the former down to an art.)

III.

Let us not forget the Buk-zombies,
Those apostles of aphorism,
Most of whom speak of their departed deity
As if he were an old drinking buddy
(Never mind that most of them were two or three
Or perhaps not even a bad idea
In the back seat of some mom’s Buick
When he exited this mortal plane, stage left, even.)
One’s mind is boggled whilst considering
The expanse of the bar required to accommodate
Everyone who would like to
(Or worse, have claimed to)
Buy old Charlie a beer, not that he’d stand for a round.
They are a sullen horde, this lot,
Best dealt with by aiming for the base of the skull.

IV.
Ah, the confessionals, Lord have mercy upon their souls
(For they shall have none upon ours.)
They feel so many things so deeply
As such things have never been felt before
(They have not read their Sexton, their Snodgrass,
Their Lowell, their Pl--well, no,
They have all read their Plath.)
It is, from the moment they arise in the morning
Until such time they set aside their fears and let sleep take them,
All too much for them,
And they bravely face the days
Until such time they care bear to take action
And fling themselves from some convenient precipice.
We should, as a service to them and ourselves,
Ensure the soles of their shoes
Are sufficiently worn and slippery.

(I hate poets.
They annoy me deeply.)

They do not, like their more esteemed Californian cousins,
Sweep into town over sloop-festooned, canvas-checkered waters,
Passing over the remnants of missions
Packed with the ghosts of Christian guilt and romantic swashbucklers;
They labor at their workaday altitude just above the treetops
Still budding in the newness of May,
Pausing to rest on the jagged orange chain-link
Which surrounds the dormant mills,
Or perhaps a sill fronting a boarded window at the old school
Before taking to their summer quarters at the abandoned quarry
A couple of miles up the Klondike Road,
and invariably one of the old-timers will say
Little birds hain't much too look at,
But at least they come back every year,
And then not giving the simple brown creatures another thought,
As they find no particular interest in the notion of flight.