Its color sat somewhere on the spectrum between brown and gray
(Such things being dependent on vagaries of the light,
And the perspective of the beholder)
And it served as a testament
To the muted benefits of near adequacy,
Being too thin for the portentous winds of December,
And too warm for the capricious sunshine of May,
Its threadbare functionality emblematic of its owner,
Whose relationship with those around him
(Indeed mankind and his universe in general)
Vacillated between an affronted indifference
And an implacable if somewhat muted contempt,
His commerce with his fellow man,
Excepting that required to provide him
With the basics of sustenance and shelter,
Carried on in an epistolary fashion,
Through letters he wrote,
Sometimes to those he encountered on a daily basis,
More often to mankind and the unheeding cosmos in general,
Which were stuffed higgledy-piggledy into his coat pockets.
These missives were not humdrum laundry lists
Of those slights and injuries, be they petty or mortal,
But rather soaring and high-flown in nature and tone,
More kin of the sermon than the scolding,
Celebrations of life’s splendors great and small,
More often than not those he knew little or nothing of first-hand.
He’d no intention of sharing these dispatches
With the world at large or anyone in particular;
He’d simply empty his pockets once they were full enough
To present an inconvenience,
And he’d laundered any number of them
On more than one occasion,
And when he’d passed behind this earthly veil,
All but unnoticed and unmourned,
His landlady had simply emptied the contents of the coat's pockets
And consigned them to the trash,
Believing the garment barely fit for charitable purposes
Washed and given a goodly airing out,
Let alone burdened with the detritus of another man’s life.

She is lying on her side, propped up on one elbow
(Her visits are infrequent, always unannounced,
But welcome all the same, more or less)
Affecting a smile which is as adorable as it is inscrutable,
Abed with but not quite next to me,
As she insists on a bundling board between us
(Not due to any chaste modesty on her part, God knows,
But, as she says in her best Blossom Dearie sing-song,
I don’t bestow my favors on just anyone.)
She floats back to this plane of consciousness
From some reverie, some flight of fancy
Her gestures and expressions
Reflect the practiced repertoire of the veteran actress.
Tell me a story, she exhorts
(I have asked her in the past why she never regales me with a tale,
To which she fixes me with a nearly benign
And wholly silent smile.)
And so, having received my marching orders, I proceed.

We knew these guys, I began
(Thus signaling yet another tale
Residing firmly in the once-upon-a-time camp)
Who moved off campus to an old house near Analomink.
A shambling old thing
Which had been added-to and cobbled-together
To the point of an adequate habitability,
(Not that the code inspector could find the place,
Let alone bother with it)
Providing shelter from the elements
As well as the occasionally inconvenient
In loco parentis  of Residential Life,
Leaving them to certain extra-legal proclivities
In the consumption and manufacture of sundry consumables
(The back yard was a warren of copper kettles, tubing, and wire
And the word was they made their own acid in a back bathroom)
Their Merry Prankster-esque weekend excursions
From campus to liquor store to homestead,
Carried out in various states of impairment
And general disrepair of the central nervous system,
Becoming the stuff of legends and let-me-tell-you this tales,
As these were heady, open-ended days,
Mortality being a thing for hundred-level classes
In Norse mythology and cellular biology,
But one time the boys made one of those Saturday night decisions
To combine microdots and cross-country skiing,
And one of them, known to all and sundry as Mad Jack
(Georgia-bred and majoring in academic probation,
His undergraduate career a reverse Sherman’s march northward
From one undistinguished institution to another;
He’d left us shortly thereafter
For some state school just below the Canadian border)
Had failed to show back at the house.
There was frantic, perplexed debate what to do next;
Surely the authorities should be notified,
But that would require an on-site presence of the gendarmerie,
With the subsequent prospect
Of dismissal and possible confinement.
Sunday afternoon came, all whistling freezing rain and wind,
And, just as they were ready to lift the receiver and gravely dial,
Jack burst in the doorway, grinning and chirping madly
About how he’d hooked up with a townie divorcee in Stroudsburg
Dude, you’re full of **** and covered in mud,
One of his roomies stammered,
But Mad Jack simply chattered on, saying that her boyfriend
Had showed up unexpectedly,
And that he’d had to beat it through a window
Standing half-dressed in the cold for a couple of hours
While they’d argued loudly and then equally loudly made up.
Hell of a night, huh boys?,
And then Jack laughed the laugh of the living,
******, isn’t someone gonna get me a beer?

So whatever became of all your friends?, my companion asks me
I shrug my shoulders, empty palms extending upward
As if expecting someone to toss a quarter
Or some other alms my way.
Don’t know for the most part.  Jobs, marriages, life its ownself.
She fixes me with the better part of a pout,
Not much of an answer, is it?
I have very little to say for myself at this point,
Save to offer up another little shrug,
And she says Well, we do what we can with what we have,
And before I can ask her what she means by that,
She has turned away from me and burrowed into the sheets,
All but indistinguishable from the covers themselves.

Even if he was not recognizable in an instant
(As who is he was—no, is—and what he has done
Has only deepened in impact and import over time)
There is still the bearing, the certain set of the jaw,
Clearly marking him as someone
Who has achieved something, has been something,
His ease in this space, seemingly unperturbed
By the setting, the crowd, the donning of the pinstripes
(Though consciously wearing them a bit loose,
The modern fabrics not as becoming to one of a certain age)
Is betrayed, just slightly, by the manner in which
He scoops some dirt from the mound;
There is just the touch of a frantic archaeology in his movements,
As if he is seeking to unearth some relic,
Some talisman providing protection and preservation ,
Or perhaps it is simply the recognition
Of how inextricable the bond is
Between this small patch of ground and his very being,
Its utter annihilation unthinkable, unspeakable to him,
Though this bit of earth is, on its face,
No different from that found on the basepaths
At some ball field off the Fordham Road,
Or the small circles of dirt surrounding the trees
Hard by the new stadium (their existence a conditional thing,
Dependent on the  ongoing haggling
Between green space and parking spots),
Clinging to their green leaves for a few more days
Before their brief explosion of brilliance
Which are the harbingers of cold November.

Ain't much

separatin'

junkies and geniuses.

Still, dude hit pavement right on the

downbeat.

I am often asked, as the inn goes quiet
Where is the dignity in a life anchored
By the brothel, the public house’s riot.
I note—politely—the base of the tankard
Provides a grand, if somewhat modulated,
Viewing of the so-called unexamined life,
A happy one not discombobulated
By the constant nattering of priest or wife.
It’s not—far from it!—that my heart is not stirred
By valiant men performing their valiant deeds,
But the urge to take up arms remains deterred
By the image of a knight face down in weeds,
And my heart’s overruled by the misgiving
That the stuff of legend precludes the living.

There was, in a once upon another time a man
(His name and work
Being lost to the boot sales and dustbins of time)
Who made a reputation as a portrait painter,
One transcending his small town in Schleswig-Holstein,
Spreading among the surrounding principalities.
Gifted with curious abilities (although he would demur,
Protesting that he was simply a man with a brush and a palette)
Allowing him to secure the favor
Of the area’s more substantial citizens,
Providing him leisure to commit to canvas
The faces of the ordinary
And, if some cases, somewhat iniquitous.
His portfolio a crazy-quilt of his milieu,
Subjects back-to-back in no particular order:
Princes and flower girls, priests and ******.


The sterling reputation the painter enjoyed
Was not due simply to technical skill
(He was, to be sure, expert in matters of shading and line,
And his eye for color and detail no less than remarkable)
But also an eye for those things
Revealed in the curve of the lips or the set of the eyes
And, more importantly for fame and purse,
The virtuosity to enhance the understated gifts
Or veil those unpleasant secrets they suggested.
And so, the venality in the banker’s sneer
Was softened to intimate nothing more
Than levelheaded concern for the sanctity of the mark and guilder,
Or the gentle smile of the prince’s youngest daughter
Augmented to evoke the beatitudes of the angels themselves.

The craft and subtlety of his work
Combined to engender the most curious effects;
Oftentimes his subjects, surely without consciousness or intent,
Began to assume those qualities  
Bestowed upon them by the nuances of line and pigment,
Becoming less parsimonious or more humane,
As dictated by the brush strokes,
Carrying on from that time forward as the finest embodiments
Of that visage captured inside the gilding of the frame.

At some point in time,
Whether through the onset of some trickle of madness,
Or perhaps just sheer whimsy,
The painter made a peculiar change in his methodology,
Beginning to graft qualities onto his subjects
Which they never embodied nor hoped to possess,
Perhaps in the hope that, having pinned them to the corkboard,
His butterflies might take wing,
But his command of light and pigment
Combined power and understatement in such a manner
That no one who sat for him ever noticed
They were being mocked or enriched, as the case might be;
And still the canvases acted as tails wagging the dog about;
Priests were found dead in their rectories,
In the midst of tableaus of unspeakable debauchery,
While courtesans lit candles and kneeled in pews
Until their backs and thighs screamed
In the service of such highly unusual positions,
Or the banker flipped the urchin a coin
While gently petting the boy’s undernourished cur,
And perhaps it was all due to the machinations of the painter,
But he would, with just a hint of slyness
Playing about the corners of his eyes and mouth,
Deny any measure of culpability.
He was, after all, just a man with a brush.

They built the thing in the wrong **** direction, you know.
The “sun field” being home plate, and come late afternoons
Every pitch a potential life-and-death experience
For hitter and catcher alike
(One young Mets farmhand, in a fit of sheer exasperation,
Actually came to the plate in full catcher’s garb.)
Still, it was—well, at least once a upon a time—just a short hop
From Pittsfield to The Show, and any old timer
Will gladly talk your ear off about how Kenny Brett,
Barely a year out of high school, don’t you know,
Went straight from here to The Impossible Dream
(Though Kenny, so improbably young in all their memories
Is long since dead now, gone like the boom-times
Before GE shut down,
Leaving nothing behind but poisons in the Housantonic.)
That is all memory, though, the park’s fortunes
Fading hand-in-hand with the city’s,
Inhabited by low-level minor league clubs
Where one player a summer
Might get his Crash Davis moment in the sun,
And later indie-league teams with kids and hangers-on,
All barely good enough to dream.
Now there is only a summer league for low-ceiling college kids,
The old wooden grandstand,
Still standing out of some implausible stubbornness
(Last living World War One veteran,
Some local lifer will invariably say, cackling and spitting
Though their ranks thinned each year
By the siren song of trailer parks in Orlando and hip fractures)
Now dotted with a group of locals,
Quirky minor-league aficionados and a cluster of area scouts,
Who, on the odd occasion of something noteworthy on the field,
Will make a show of pulling out a stopwatch or radar gun
(Though they are aware they are here
With the lowest-common-denominator expectations,
Looking for organizational types,
Middle relievers and fifth outfielders to fill out rosters)
But most of the time, they simply huddle together
Talk quietly,speaking in inaudible tones
The words of some dead and inscrutable language.