You see,

It's quite simple;

Fate will always *****-slap

Those who just can't leave well enough

Alone.

Back in the day before the game quit us,
We’d balled down at the rec center with an old guy
Who went by the name of Terry Easy.
He was there every afternoon, every night
(As far as we knew, he’d been there forever,
The joke being Hell, man, Easy was there
Three minutes after they got the floor down.)
Big old dude, but you could tell from the way he moved,
Even the way he walked, that he had game at one time,
Though he’d gotten to the wrong side of the transition
From solid to just plain fat
(We’d woof at him Easy, you get any more flab on your *******
And we’re gonna have to go from shirts-and-skins
To bras-and-blouses, for chrissakes.)
And he played with coke-bottle glasses so thick
You figured he couldn’t hit the backboard from outside three feet.
Still, if you didn’t pick the man up a few steps across half-court,
He’d bury you with set shots --‘course, if you played him too tight
He’d just back-door your *** for layups all night
(As far as playing D went, Easy was pretty easy pickings,
Though he’d try to make up for a lack of foot speed
With old man tricks--locking his knee behind yours
To push you off the blocks, a quick grab of the shorts
As you cut through the lane, stuff that starts fights,
Though taking a shot at Easy was just something you didn’t do
Something unspoken that you just knew was out of bounds.)
Between games, Easy would tell stories about his playground days:
He’d played on all the courts with all the legends,
16th and Susquehanna with Lewis Lloyd and Sad-Eyes Watson,
48th and Brown with The Pearl,
Ridgeway Playground with Wilt and Hal Greer.
One day Easy was telling a story about how Greer,
Playing out the string with a Sixers team
That won nine **** games all season,
Was playing against Wilt one night when the Lakers were in town.
Hal went down the lane, and Wilt was right there,
Getting ready to swat the pill…hell, eight, nine rows up,
Maybe halfway to Doylestown, but at the last moment
He pulled his hand back, and let the ball tap, tap, tap on the rim
Before it dropped through for two
(For old times’ sake, Wilt said later.)
Hal didn’t see it that way, giving Wilt a shove and glaring at him
All the way back down court, and after the game
He stormed into the Laker locker room,
Screaming Where the **** is Wilt? I’m gonna beat his ***!
And, catching sight of the big man, hollered ever louder
You play it straight with me, *******, you hear me?
You never disrespect my *** on the court again! Never!
All the time two or three guys holding Hal back
(And understand, Wilt was the biggest, baddest man in the game;
Hell, one time he picked up Mel Daniels,
Six-feet-nine of evil and bad temper, like a Raggedy Andy)
And the big man never said a word, ‘cause he knew was wrong,
So Terry told the story, anyway,
And Easy should have stopped right there,
‘Cause the story was over, but old men get foolish, get all soppy,
So he says Hal was right, understand-;
You just can’t do that to a man.
Old player like Greer, maybe all he’s got left is his pride,
Like some old lion who can’t hunt no more, but he’s earned that.
Gotta let a lion have his pride, and after he finished
All the young ‘uns just hooted at him
Man, Easy, you do go on, and for months afterward
Every time the dude covering him turned his head
And gave Easy an easy bucket, everyone on the court
Would just laugh, and yell That’s good huntin’, man.
Roar, lion, roar.

I have long since forgotten his name
(He was only around for my sophomore year at Dear Old State)
As he was universally known as  “Coal Miner”,
Being of all things, a geology major,
The nickname being buttressed by one heroic drunk
In whose aftermath  he brought forth, all Vesuvius-like,
A dark concoction of dirt, twigs, and some small bits of stone,
Though by and large he was reasonably diligent in his classwork ,
Maintaining his drinking and general decorum
Within sensible boundaries
Not adhered to by the general run of dwellers
In our brick bungalow of doubles and triples.

One perhaps-it’s-truly-Spring day just before finals week,
The Miner went off in an in aberrant and inexplicable rampage,
Replete with wall punching, blood letting,
And annihilation of light fixtures
Which spilled out of the dorm, across the academic commons,
And ended just inches from the Dean of Students himself.
It was the last any of us saw of The Coal Miner
Before he and his disappearance rode off together
As the stuff of undergraduate legend.
We later heard The Miner’s mother had died
Suddenly, unaccountably, down in Cortland,
Succumbing to some rare and misdiagnosed malady
(To be fair, it was one of those illnesses
Beyond the experience or worldview of small-town hospitalists)
And, with her, all his means of support, emotional and otherwise
Vanished like so much ash blown away
From the site of some ghastly fire.
To disprove the theory that God only sends us what we can stand,
The college regretted to inform him
That they were unable to provide
For the unfortunate contingency at hand,
And as such, his only mildly distinguished academic career
Was brought to an abrupt and unfortunate end.

We later heard he’d told one of the coterie of security officers
Who had wrestled him to the ground
(Thus preventing the Dean’s untimely
Though likely unlamented end)
That one of the faded, clumsy portraits
Depciting long-dead medical directors
Lining the entranceway corridor of that hospital back home
Had actually hissed to him
What do you want from us?  We’re only men, after all.
(He’d been in the full-blown midst
Of his shock and grief at the time,
So the possibility of hallucination certainly couldn’t be discounted)
And one of his hall-mates swore upon his mother’s life
He’d seen the shoulders of the founder’s statue
(Heroic bronze figure outside of Waddington Hall
Smiling benevolently,palms upturned, hands outstretched
Offering a bounty of knowledge to all comers)
Actually began to droop a little bit after it had been passed
By a screaming, bloodied, raging Coal Miner,
Though that tale was the handiwork of Tommy Mulligan,
Who was sodden and given to pure foolishness
Remarkable even by our standards,
And I later heard the Coal Miner
Was living in a barely habitable cabin
Up on the shore of Saranac Lake
Where he had become a stonemason
Specializing in the restoration of headstones
Buffeted by epochs of mountain sleet
And Midwest-borne acid rains.

The classically-trained and symphony-polished,
If someone deigned to listen to their disapprobations,
Would tell all and sundry that he was playing it all wrong;
Indeed, his technique so unsound, his ******* so maladroit
That those who had wrestled with that stringed contraption
Reportedly favored by the angels
For years, indeed decades, at Julliard and Oberlin
Insisted that he couldn’t really play at all
(His opinion of his critics remained unquoted,
Though it was said he tuned his instrument
In such a fashion to ensure that he alone
Could produce notes from it)
Yet every night, in the middle of another knockabout farce,
He would sit alone, under a single light, and pluck away
While the gathering in the seven-fifty tickets sat rapt,
Commutes from Chappaqua and mortgages in Great Neck
Forgotten for the *****, wholly transported out of themselves
By the shabby- hatted and unruly-mopped figure before them,
Even the cognoscenti and conservatory-bred
Bewitched in spite of themselves,
Though they regarded the strumming
Much differently than the great unwashed in the stalls
(The author of these anomalous tones, being a reticent sort,
Keeping his opinion of them to himself.)

(for ed hart)

well, you fell out of a tree
(beguiling, bewitching, the tips of the branches
long fingers gesturing to you, whispering
listen, kid, i got a secret to tell you.)
and, boom, that was the first time your collarbone got busted up.
maybe later you were just daydreaming, or, more likely,
drunk on some boone’s farm or some girl,
anyway at some point you decided ******* it,
i’m just not falling anymore,
but there was always some cracked pavement
or some tree root hidden by a patch of grass
you missed with the mower,
a million sundry distractions besides,
and one day don’t you just know
that you stuck your hand down  to catch yourself
(of course, you knew how **** stupid that was
the moment you reached earthward,
but the die already cast and all that nonsense)
and, bam, there’s a wrist, snapped like dry kindling.
well, maybe, if your’re lucky enough
and the right angels are looking out for you,
you live long enough to figure out that you’re gonna fall,
and the trick is to hit and roll on your good shoulder.

How many deaths are we allotted, then?
It depends on the strictness of your definition, one supposes,
For it comes in several degrees of fatality and finality,
And most often in fits and starts,
A process by which we offer up limbs,
Bits of heart and soul,
So that we can forestall some disaster
Even more wretched, more unwelcome,
And even if we walk more slowly, more cautiously
As the repeated runnings of the gauntlet exact their toll,
It may not be the implacable onslaught of age
Which roils our sleep and the periphery of our waking hours
As much as the knowledge
That, unlike our multi-epoched feline brethren,
We may not land on our feet
As the unseen hands blithely toss us
Down one more set of stairs
Which lead to the abyss.

It is decommissioned, off-limits, outright verboten,
Yet is traversed nonetheless,
Its patrons a mix of the pruriently curious,
The thrill-seeker, the merely woebegone.
As they have time on their side,
The hub-bub of school buses and suburban commuters
No concern as they navigate the buckled and broken asphalt
(The conflagration underneath changing the topography
Daily, sometimes even hourly)
They will stop to paint some phrase, some bon mot
On this roadway-***-canvas:
Mostly the narcissistic monologue we bray at the universe,
The assertion that we were here, are here,
And (though it is plaintive yet unspoken) that we always may be,
Augmented with light hearted double entendres
And grim, hectoring Biblical quotations,
While not far away, the re-directed two lanes of blacktop
Carry onward, indifferently proceeding on its way
Through these stolidly scruffy old anthracite towns,
Their landscapes and the ground beneath them
Quiet as the sepulcher, the vagaries of their fates above the sod,
Stalking them impassively yet implacably.