They still weep;
Not as often in those early days
When the telegram delivery boy,
Every bit as foreboding as the Grim Reaper,
Had arrived at their particular doorstep,
But at odd, importune times:
When the light shines just so in his old bedroom,
(Some instances just as he left it,
Other times clean and empty
As if never occupied at all)
The sound of boys playing baseball
In the field on the Klondike Road,
The bells at the Methodist Church
Ringing for another young couple.
Still, the world rolls along
In its own diffident manner:
There are cars, butter, and gasoline now,
Young men who were at Midway and Omaha Beach
Are back on the line at the mill,
Their mothers plan weddings
And buy dresses from Larson’s down in Ridgway.
They may pause briefly if they catch something
In the eye of a friend
Who has no need to buy frocks
Or reserve banquet halls,
And they will say, casting down their eyes a bit
Life goes on, I guess.
Yes, but they still weep

(for Alice Bridgwood)


At some point, we simply say to hell with it:
Whether undone by the shortcomings at our craft
Or by the simple bulk of our mere humanity,
We come to the conclusion that certain mysteries of the universe
Shall remain exactly that—oh, we’ll still have
The odd glimpse of the Platonic,
The glimmering flicker of epiphany
Bestowed upon us a few frames at a time,
Grainy and Zapruder-esque,
But, by and large, we will remain sheepish
As some television weatherman who,
Though ostensibly trained to understand the behaviors
Of sluggish storms making their way lugubriously from the Southwest
Or brisk mid-February Alberta lows,
Must admit he, too, was bamboozled
By the sudden deluge or foot-plus of snow.

What, then, do we make of one
To whom the inscrutable calculus of the spheres
Is an open book, as simple as connect-the-dots
Or some child’s paint-by-numbers
(But augmented with shading and shadow
Until the picture is not simple rote coloring
But something else, something finer and all her own),
Whose words move us to follow where she may lead,
Like medieval peasants, dirt poor and bewitched,
Who flocked to the Holy Land
Following the charismatic little shepherd child,
All hayseed and bucolic charm
(Yet all of that simply myth arriving whole cloth,
A mish-mash of sloppy scholarship and errant translation;
She’d have sussed it in an instant)
Hoping that some smattering of his grace
Would trickle down upon them,
Not unlike the prayer of the farmer,
His lands parched and salted, hearing thunderstorms
Rumbling in terrible grandeur in the distance,
Hopes the odd drop or two reaches his fields.

They walk—no, more likely, they saunter,
Embassy functionaries, associate profs at G-Dub,
A smorgasbord of polka dots and vitae,
Leopard-print and Linkedin pages,
Sufficent and necessary in their presents and futures.
I occupy a bench in my own shambling manner,
Denim-clad most days,
Perhaps affecting a less humble khaki
If I am feeling particularly grandiloquent,
Redeployed here from more rough-and-tumble of more avenues,
Among the bar-and-concrete hosteled llamas and coyotes
(Probably closer kin, if one is being honest)
Simply an ornamental thing, overgrown garden gnome
Or bowdlerized lawn jockey, unobtrusive and unnoticed
By those who would coo at the macaos and mandarin ducks
Or shudder at the offal left uneaten by black bears and maned wolves.
And so such days proceed, from my convenience-store coffee arrival
To such time that something approximating dinner
Must be conjured or cadged from somewhere,
My thoughts tend to stray not to the lionesses
Nor sleek Catwoman-esque jaguars,
But to the unpretentious turkey vultures of the fields of my youth,
Circling warily, inexorably in threes and fours above
And I know there is neither ennobling nor annihilation to find here,
No outcome but to simply await.

We’d made things once, things of substance:
Copiers, straight-sixes for Chevelles, Novas, Impalas,
And tons of film, of course, loaded into tiny Instamatics
Which accompanied us to everywhere and everything
(Unless they mystifyingly scampered away from pocket or purse,
In which case we drove, cursing and volleying blame to and fro,
Fifteen, twenty, maybe more miles to retrieve them
From the kitchen table or back of the toilet)
To document births and baptisms and weddings,
The in-betweens and hereafters,
(Renderings of children and dogs
Sitting under trees with blossoms of pink and red
The blooms implausibly bright, child and beast stolid yet smiling,
Or tableaus of tux-clad cousins and brothers,
Squinting blankly in the aftermath of a visual right-cross
Courtesy of the supernova-esque emanation
From the blue cube perched on the camera’s top)
So they would not be victims of the vagaries of memory.

All of that is gone--no, taken--from us now,
The means of production having embarked for Memphis or Mumbai,
Those things which sustained us now simply vestigial curiosities,
Like hand-cranked presses or ancient milking machines
We’d tittered at on long-ago school field trips.
The march of time and technology, to be fair,
But it has left us obsolescent as well,
Stranding us without context or clarity,
With access to neither advance or retreat
(The old photographs simply mock us now,
The red-eyed images fading to the soft tones
Of a rose at the end of its summer,
The name of the third man on the left,
Who’d worked on the line with us nearly three full decades,
Refusing to be conjured out of the thin air)
Leaving us diffuse and unordered
As the old and cracked negatives
Stuffed higgledy-piggledy between old snapshots
In an enveloped at the back of an old file drawer.

i.

I remember, when I was a much younger girl,
How my grandfather would hold a kopek in his hand
And, making it flutter slowly as if it were in flight
Would pantomime dropping it into a small sack,
Kicking a horseshoe or barrel stave against a rock
To approximate the sound of the coin hitting the sack,
Surreptitiously nudging the bottom of the canvas
To accentuate the deception.
We knew, of course, that it was mere sleight-of-hand
(Indeed, as he grew older and we less credulous,
It was fairly easy to pick up at what point
The small, tarnished piece was actually palmed),
But it was Grandfather, after all, and besides,
The invention was much more pleasant than the reality.

ii.

We were, naturally, prepared to die;
Indeed, if you wear a belt of explosives,
You prefer not to consider other outcomes.
It did not come to pass; there are, sadly, always spies,
Provocateurs who prefer pennies over principles,
And so I have come to this fortress to await my pas de deux
With the roughness of the rope and the kick of the lever.

But there shall be no death.

No death? they shall say, Surely the gravity of your plight,
The strain of isolation has caused you to take leave of your senses,
But I am as clear and constant
As the bells in the guard tower
Which toll on the quarter hour.

Ah, but here is the judge,
Great eyebrows knit, jaw tight,
Reading, measured in tone and pace, from the paper
Which outlines the finality of your sentence,
And I say it is no more than mere parchment,
His words the empty fulminations
Of an unconnected party.

But see here, Musechka, they will insinuate slyly,
What of this image--the eyes bulging,
The face distorted and blue, the tongue blackened,
And I respond that such a depiction,
Along with all prior inquiries and protests,
Are from without and, as such,
No concern of mine.

iii.

When, come sunup the day after tomorrow,
It is time for the law and justice
To finish going through the requisite motions,
I shall walk to the platform
Burdened with neither regret
Nor any notion of dying well
(Such thoughts are for priests, foppish cavalry officers)
And the soldiers that cut me down
Shall, I am sure, will be somewhat irritated with me
For they shall have seen I have, in a sense,
Engineered my own exit,
And that it was a trick
Which they played no part in contriving.

It is generally supposed we come to this place
As a just reward for treachery and traitorousness.
Indeed, nothing could be farther from the truth;
Most of my compatriots her have blindly hitched their fortunes
To some flag, some shining dogma, our fates sealed
Through an unwillingness to be sufficiently self-interested,
The refusal to abandon ship once it became apparent
That the experience upon the rocks
Would be neither enabling nor ennobling.
My own case is illustrative of the rule;
My father, noble sovereign ascending to the throne
Via parlor tricks and the rustic embrace of folk legend,
(The fornication resulting in my birth brushed aside
As some accident of mistaken identity or enchantment)
Is celebrated, beatified really, in song and legend,
Yet I, who pulled myself up by my own bootstraps as it were,
Winning his queen’s hand and defeating him on the field,
Am consigned to this unhappy place in perpetuity,
Suffering demons who hiss *******! Usurper!
As they put me through my paces
(One takes their rebukes with a grain of salt;
They are all mad, the likely result of dealing with this glut of madmen.)
As I noted, the presence of myself and my brethren in this place
Serve as a testament to the merits of fidelity,
Which we commemorate daily, some days several times
(I confess it seems more than a touch silly,
But the necessity of creating distractions
Trumps other concerns in a locale such as this)
By staging caucus races, each participant addressing
The ******* in front of him directly,
Paying it fealty--My liege! My liege!--which is answered in turn
By a cannonade of noxious farting
(We assume the smells to be offensive,
As the atmosphere here is somewhat deleterious at all times)
All to the great amusement of those sprites
Who observe our machinations,
They in turn guffawing madly and urinating downward upon us
While we, as the acidic waste corrodes us, also cackle like lunatics,
Fairly shouting Ah, the gentle rain of Heaven--thank you, Lord!
Though, oddly enough, our laughter at times
(Most likely due to the aridity of the atmosphere around us)
Seems to catch a bit in the throat.

It had, so he recalled, no pretensions of being something
So grand as a lake;
Just a roundish body of water, not particularly suited for diving
Nor of any real attraction to a fisherman,
Nothing there save the odd chub or sunfish to languidly pull one’s line,
Its recreational attributes limited to a postage-stamp size patch of sand
And one solitary rope attached to an equally lonely old truck tire,
Neither being of guaranteed fitness for the task at hand.
He’d gone there for one reason, and one reason only;
There’d been a girl, one late spring and a subsequent early fall,
And at times they’d gone there on the occasional sunny day,
Traversing a twisting two-lane stretch of county road
(The blacktop sprinkled with North Country sandstone,
Giving it the pinkish hue of a rainbow trout
Angrily flopping about on a dock)
In order to get waist-deep in the water for a few minutes
(The pond never really warm enough
To swim in with malice aforethought)
Before settling on blankets to drink cokes
And eat the sandwiches they’d picked up
At the ancient, Mayberry-esque general store just west of town
And to speak in hesitant and uncomfortable half-sentences
Concerning accidents of birth and death, speculative half-made plans.

In the end, it all went no further than talk,
At least after the inevitable transition
From the fleeting, furtive evenings
To the harsh, unremitting light of day.
In truth, he’d always had one eye fixed beyond the horizon,
Beyond the lumbering, lumpy old Adirondack foothills,
Alternately comforting and claustrophobic,
All the time paying heed
To some some whisper, nagging and ethereal,
That all this was simply some momentary way station on the path
To something finer, something substantive, some end of the road;
He’d no way of knowing that the murmur would remain,
Soft yet persistent, long after he’d left that cold cow country,
Rumbling on as the calendar proceeded and the hairline receded.

His work, as it happened, sometimes carried him
To the stark, sparsely populated environs
Situated to the north of the Thruway,
And he would, almost in spite of himself, concoct some excuse
To take himself back out by the old pond,
Still unprepossessing, the same tree sporting the rope-and-tire swing
(Some descendant of the one he had known,
But in the same uneasy state of disrepair),
And, now and then, he’d pull off onto the shoulder,
Leaving the car to walk down by the water’s edge.
On one occasion, he’d had the mad impulse
To dive into the water head-first and fully immerse himself,
And had gone as far as to take off his shirt and tie.
He’d checked himself in the end, of course;
There were any number of water-borne nasties
Courtesy of beavers and Canada geese, most likely leeches as well.
He’d dressed himself, and headed back to the car,
Making a note to himself to remember the hair-pin curve
Just this side of Hannawa Falls, gruesome stretch of road
Which had claimed its share of undergraduates back in his day,
And he’d always thought it sad how many bright futures
Had tumbled over the guardrails and into the ravine
To be held like dark secrets in the underbrush.