When I was a child, we’d lived on the edge of some woods,
Slightly hilly land, crossed with the odd stream or cowpath.
I’d walked there frequently, aimlessly,
Throwing the occasional stone here and there
(Skimming the smaller ones off the surface of the creek,
Displacing mosquitoes and dragonflies,
The larger rocks reserved for thickets of trees,
Rewarding me with a rich thwack if the missile found its target.)
Once I had tossed a great gray projectile
(All but shot-put sized, probably nicked and nibbled
By fossilized trilobites on its edges)
Into a stand of old horse chestnuts,
But the sound that emerged was not the woody report expected,
But an anguished and almost astounded cry,
Nearly human in its astonishment and pain.
I’d winged (more than that, in truth **** near killed)
A hawk sitting inexplicably low in the branches.
In my panic and puzzlement, I’d wrapped the bird in my jacket
(The hawk all but shredding its lining,
Adding to my mother’s already fervent agitation
Over having a wild bird in her kitchen not destined for the oven)
And taken it home, where we’d put it in a cage
(Not a bird cage per se, but the old crate for our dog
Who had wandered into these woods
A few months before when she’d sensed her time was at hand)
Where it sat silently for a couple of days,
Refusing food, water, or any other succor,
Simply staring at us with a searing look conveying a hatred
Which transcended species, language,
Any and all experience a child may have been privy to,
As, in those fresh-scrubbed, clean-linen days of youth,
I had nothing of the hawk’s knowledge of cages.

It was every bit a part of her as her fingers or her voice
(That being an instrument mostly unused now),
And it didn’t matter that she might be wearing stripes or checks,
Not that she spent a great deal of time fiddling with her clothes,
Preening herself in the mirror like some dried-up peacock,
Not that she’d done so at any stage of her life,
As that was for the vain:
Young girls justly so, or faded prom queens who,
Despite all evidence to the contrary,
Refused to accept the primacy of decay.

It’s not like I was never young, you know she would demur,
And, in fact, she had played along-- she’d gone to the dances,
Gossiped at the sleep-overs, tried her hardest to work up enthusiasm
During the pep rallies before the games against Ridgway or St. Mary’s,
Even allowing herself to be courted by a shy, gentle offensive tackle
Later lost in Korea, forgotten boy in a forgotten war,
But there was always something not quite right,
A certain air of fragility and impermanence,
(Even though the presence of the Montmorenci Mills,
Hulking solidity of brick and mortar and yelping machinery,
Cradled the town in its enduring embrace
And beyond town, endless hills encumbered with spruce and pine
So thick the forest floor never saw so much as a glimpse of daylight
Between December and mid-March)
A curious buzzing, droning and mosquito-like,
Saying in a persistent whisper Surely this can’t be all there is;
There must be something true, something fine,
Something enduring to hang one’s dreams upon.

She was right, certainly, on the larger point;
The mill closed, thrusting the town into a collective limbo
Where they couldn’t divorce themselves from a reality
Which no longer existed, and, as the years rolled diffidently onward,
Morphed into something that never truly was
(Meanwhile the woods, inexorable as some ancient, half-blind old bear,
Digesting the odd abandoned hunting camp or hobo’s lean-to,
Seemed to creep farther toward the main roads each year),
And each year brought fewer inquiries
As to her availability and amenability
Until her solitude was final, impenetrable;
Indeed, she never found reason to look back upon on those days
Where she could have been half of something,
Save for the several occasions when (for no reason she could fathom,
Which in itself perplexed her to no end)
She thought back to the time they visited the fortune teller
Who had a tent, the opening of which she watched nervous, hawklike
At the county fair over in Clearfield,
And the mystic had taken one look at her hand,
Tracing the palm mournfully
And said, in a voice shackled in an unspeakable sadness,
*Poor little thing, you’ll never see forty, I’m afraid.
I’ve never seen a lifeline that short.

I shared a beer and sympathy with a gnarled, obsolete man
Whose wizened visage spoke of unwise choices.
He spoke wistfully (though apropos of nothing) of an abandoned diner
Near the terminus of a truncated and decommissioned road,
Its parking lot an unhappy armistice
Of cracked tarmac and scrub grasses,
The building still sporting caricatures of the proprietors
(The artist a devotee of the Bob’s Big Boy school)
Though time had robbed them of the odd eyeball,
And a shoulder or elbow had faded surreptitiously into the background.
Much of a large sign remained as well,
Appearing to be nothing less
Than some leviathan’s abandoned crossword puzzle,
Fairly shouting “THE B ST  DA N STE K
BETW  N SYR C SE  AND OT T WAOR Y UR MON Y B CK!”  
Nothing else remained, my companion intimated,
Save the odd abandoned farmhouse and vestigial fields,
With long unmended barbed-wire fences doing their level best
To contain the ghosts of bygone and unlamented cows.

They rarely bother to mow here anymore,
Once a month, perhaps every other
(Times are tight, full burials being pretty much
A thing of the past these days)
Though it’s unlikely anyone would notice
If the grass grew a bit longish,
Or the crownvetch and crabgrass became a little more prevalent,
No one being buried in this part of the cemetery
For the better part of a hundred years now,
The stones bleached and faded from decades of sleet and sunlight
And acid rain from the auto plants of Flint and Lorain and South Bend,
(Now boneyards for gears and drill bits themselves)
Those names still legible on the teetering, unsteady stones
Mostly the stolid Scotch-Irish surnames
Vaguely familiar from the town’s founding generation
Found on its street signs or pocket-parks,
Their descendants mostly having fled to friendlier climes,
Though the odd lesser strain of the families remain
(Not that they would choose to pay tribute to those ancestors
To whom they have fared so poorly in comparison)
Though many more bear the family names of their trades,
Clusters of Coopers, Weavers, and Smiths,
Their stones bearing the sentiments of grim Victorian fatalism,
Thus in mercy early call’d away or The happy soul is that which fled.
Such thoughts are quaint, eccentric things to us now,
As would be the clothes they wore, the songs they sung,
But we would know them nonetheless,
Know the muted joy of their minor successes,
The depth and finality of their defeats,
The sting of bowing and scraping
To the owners of the mill, the haughty town fathers,
As they served them at the milliners or the drug store,
Their odd, fleeting dreams of grandeur having come to rest here,
Cherry-lidded as they proceed to dust.

We’d known him, back in the day
At dear old Millard Fillmore Elementary,
As Three-Desks Tommy, highly imaginative monicker
Deriving from his decidedly unimaginative first name
And the fact that he, indeed, had three desks,
Each of them stuffed chock-full
With uncounted numbers of pencils and erasers,
Any number of homework papers
(Usually A’s and A-pluses,
Though there were the odd B’s and B-minuses as well,
As he was a bright, in fact inordinately bright, child,
But sometimes given to sloppiness and stray pencil marks
And a predilection for not reading the directions completely)
Eerily accurate renditions of dinosaurs,
Wildly inventive stories featuring rainbow-hued dragons,
Noble and voluble talking bovines,
And knights and knaves of every size, shape, and suzerain,
Stories which resided cheek-to-jowl with some bit of uneaten sandwich
Until such time it made its existence
Abundantly clear to the custodial staff.
We’d never stopped to think much about his miniature Maginot Line;
It was what Tommy did and had always done
For as long as we could remember,
Though there were some teachers and an assistant principal or two
Who thought the whole thing was permissive bordering on coddling
(His teacher was a veteran of the wars, and well-insulated by tenure,
But she had grown weary of over-glasses glares and snide asides
When Tommy’s name came up in the staff room,
A death by a thousand cuts and all that),
And one day, while moving one of his desks
To clear space for Simon Says,
It had caught on a sticky spot,
Overturning onto a soon-to-be-fractured toe.
When he came back to school, accompanied by an ungainly cast
And an equally ungainly pair of crutches, his teacher took him aside.
Tommy, she purred, Maybe someone is trying to tell you something.
The other kids all make due with one desk,
And I’m sure you can find a way to as well, don’t you, Tommy?
So Tommy embarked on a great cleansing of his little fiefdom,
Filling several garbage cans with his collected works,
(Math papers and mastodons, bologna and Brobdingnagians)
And afterward he’d kept himself to one standard desk,
Duly filing, returning, and circular-filing his paperwork
As the occasion demanded
(Though one time Murph Dunkirk
Asked Three-Desks if he minded downsizing;
Tommy just shrugged, and said Well, it’s better than a broken foot)
And maybe in his dreams he had a thousand desks,
A thousand tops to fling open,
A thousand repositories for light and legend
Or perhaps he never gave it so much as a second thought,
No way to know now, one supposes,
Though if anything out of the ordinary had come his way,
We would’ve probably heard.

Such children, our playwrights;
They labor under the sad misconception
That, having written their labored little prose,
They shall be presented wholly unfiltered by the performers.
From God’s lips to their ears, they say, ostensibly joking
While their features and inflection bear full witness
To how deeply serious they are in truth.
The poor souls have no idea
(Really, no more than infants, every last one of them)
Just how little their tottering little farces have to say
Concerning the profundity of suffering, the fever of desire,
(How could they know, locked away in their rooms with nothing
But their parchment and quills—truly, from whence will come
The Moreto or de Molina for our age, artists yet men as well?)
And yet the trained performer is able
With no more than the odd inflection,
The certain insouciance  in the crook of an elbow,
The telltale arch of an eyebrow
As another actor declaims his lines,
Provide blood and marrow to the sad scratchings of the purported author, Create meanings never conceived of by the dramatist.  
How many nights have I shot glances
At these poor men of letters, wringing their hands anxiously,
Huddled in the wings on the opening night of their turgid set pieces.
What performances (however involuntary and unconscious)
They would give, faces contorting with surprise and fury,
Fists clenching with rage or grabbing at their tresses
In frustration and stupefaction at what had been made
From their foolish idioms, their labored clichés.
And, after a surfeit of bows had been taken,
They would come before me,
Bowing slowly, stiffly, mechanically in an effort to keep their anger
From virtually surging from their bodies,
Meekly saying Truly, Senora, I did not know
What effect your legerdemain could have
Upon the audience and my humble words,
But, for all their politeness, their hatred is palpable,
For I have thrown their cherished natural order on its head,
As I have usurped them as the creator.

Still, one should not be so harsh with these hijos;
The error is a common one:
So many viceroys and kings, so many priests and archbishops
Have tried to fix the yoke of man’s poor misapprehension
Upon the forces of the universe,
Forces which would brush them into the abyss
With no more forethought than they would rend the web
Of the poor, innocent spider.  
I have, on several occasions,
Accompanied many a man of means to the gaming table,
Have seen them win handsome sums
And seen others lose those every bit as spectacular.  
I have found the victors to be men
Who do not try to ascertain the hidden mysteries of the deck,
Nor bemoan the fact that they are denied the deal,
But rather treat the cards as simple things
(No more than mere bits of paper, drabs of colored ink),
Minute stages provided to display one’s craft and wisdom
In the pursuit of pleasure and profit.

He is in his rooms in the Kenmore Hotel,
Once-gracious lady favored by the ancient city’s elite,
Now tired old harlot patching and spackling with powders and rouges
In a vain attempt to camouflage the slide toward oblivion,
Only fit for unwitting out-of-towners
And those with short-term business transactions to ply
(He stays there out of nostalgia, perhaps,
Or possibly because they’d let him through the door without question
Back when that was far from a given,
Or maybe because it was the trumpet players’ place,
The story being that Bunny Berigan had once left a horn
As payment for an outlandish and fabulously overdue bar tab.)
He is holding court with a local features writer,
Another interview in another town,
(Ostensibly a one-on-one sit-down,
But his suite more like Sears the weekend before Christmas:
Band members doing walk-through warm-ups,
Friends old and new darting in and out,
Lucille frantically mother-henning the whole process)
Juggling many hats as he speaks,
Part-time salesman for semi-herbal quasi-diet aids,
Mirthful mangler of malapropos,
All rolling forth with with an air of street-level entrepreneurship,
But there is a more stolid, settled quality about him now,
The assumption of the mantle of icon
(Bestowed upon him by a continent
Far from his birth, but still)
And the time comes for him to begin the warm-up,
Starting with a high note here, a low note there,
Until he finds one note, that note,
A thing not constrained by lead sheets, acoustics,
Indeed any human construct at all.
On the street outside, two young men,
All stingy brimmed hats, narrow ties,
And not-quite top-line silk mohair suits
(Flipped in and out of the pawn shop
Any number of times, but still)
Shoes shined to a military gleam,
Walking with a gait which implies
That they are hustlers, yes,
But men of substance, nonetheless.
One of them hears the note,
And wonders aloud,
Man, who’s got a horn like that
Around this neighborhood?
(Neither of them deign to look up toward the hotel,
As, for them, threat and opportunity
Is something that exists strictly at street-level)
But his partner grunts dismissively,
Never even breaking stride,
Man, just some old **** fool
Playin’ some old tom’s records.