In fact, they will, at certain times in certain locales, toil or spin,
For sometimes the exigencies of the gray and workaday world
Are immune to the notion that there exist rare entities
Which should be simply allowed to be beautiful,
No more and no less—still, how remarkable it is that,
Whether they be grown in fertile, well-tended soil
Or in a ***** dump chock-a-block with used condoms
And the unfortunate by-products of unhappy liaisons,
They bloom nonetheless; indeed, once they are cut
And arranged just so, the man who tends the vase
Would be wise to remain somewhat circumspect
As to their origin and pedigree.

There are the mysteries of life, those of faith
(Leastwise according to Pastor, though I suspect
That is the get out of jail free card one acquires
By standing upright in the pulpit)
But death is a pretty clear-cut thing,
Going about its business all methodically,
Like a combine up one row and down the other,
And even if it’s a sudden thing,
(Folks coming up to you at the wake in some relative’s parlor,
Patting you on the forearm, absently, mechanically,
Purring At least he went quickly, dear)
It’s all down to any number of things,
Small, unobserved, nothing you’d notice at the time,
Like geese, one here and two there,
Flying to no place in particular
Until they darken the sky with their huge V;
Why, even when old Kuzitski the junkman
Ran his truck off the road up off the Hancock Road
And burned himself up all to hell,
That had been stalking him for days, years,
Maybe from birth.

Every once in a while, I will run into one of the girls from school
(Only on occasion, mind you--I suspect most of them
Go out of their way to avoid me, as where my life has led
Is a strange, almost monstrous thing to them)
And most often there is just idle chit-chat
About how dry the weather has been,
And how they opened a new Jamesway over in Walton,
But if there is someone who occupied that niche
Of best-friend or something akin to that,
Someone who shared sleep-overs and cigarettes,
They will ask me (quietly, almost conspiratorially)
How my newly minted singularity is a blessing in disguise,
Saying breezily Why, just think of what you can do now…
Trailing off to nowhere when they see the toddler
Wound around my legs, and then they understand
The weight of motherhood, of mortgages and monthly notices,
The unrelenting gravity of the whole thing.
(When you have buried a husband,
A good man who was the only port in a storm
When what passes for fun, Adam and Eve’s knowledge,
Goes all pear-shaped on you;
You get a goodly glimpse of what is and is not.)
Other girls I graduated with have gone further ,
Broadening themselves, as some maiden aunt would say;
They float back into town come Thanksgiving and Christmas,
On break from the teachers’ colleges at Cortland or New Paltz,
And I can hear them breathlessly nattering on
About all they’ve learned on evaluating children,
Standard-testing and psychology-textbook regurgitation,
And it is all I can do not to spit,
Not to turn on them and yell
You do not know the first **** thing about any **** thing,
But I let it pass--they will find out plenty soon enough,
It will find them all in its own time.

She brushed her veil aside and tilted her head upward,
Not seeking comfort or benediction,
Only to confirm what she **** well knew was happening,
That the skies, full of gray and grim portent if not outright malice,
Had picked this very time to begin steadily dripping,
Signaling what was sure to be a sodden downpour
(The weekend already chock-a-block with disasters:
The chocolate fountain a testament to dysfunction,
The rehearsal dinner poached salmon overdone and dry
The limousine company downsizing them at the last minute,
Having realized their top-line models
Could never handle the grade or narrow figure-eight drive
Up to the mansion’s precarious hilltop locale.)
The photographer, who’d lived around here all his days
And had developed a sixth sense
Concerning the vagaries of the weather
As well as those of combustible brides,
Had done his best to border-collie the proceedings along,
But as the droplets increased in size and intensity
Recriminations were hurled and doors slammed
As the bridal party sulked off
Toward what promised to be a most interesting reception.

We’d witnessed the goings on,
(Bride fulminating, groom supplicating
The location for the pictures apparently his idea,
Thus proving there are places
Where angels and husbands should fear to tread)
From a safe distance, under the overhang of the great porch
Overlooking the broad, ostensibly placid Hudson below,
Having come here in spite of the clouds,
As the odd rumble of thunder,
And occasional spate of rain being part and parcel of things,
As we’d mucked through these parts long enough to know
That they were fleeting,
And not without compensations of their own
If one was of a mind to seek them out
(We knew full well of the bewitchment
Of seeing the clouds descend slowly,
Covering the sleeping silhouette of old Rip Van Winkle
Slumbering in the knobby Catskill foothills just to the southeast)
And no more than fifteen minutes
After the newly minted man and wife left,
The sun broke through, glorious and unfiltered,
And we ducked into the great room of the house,
Reveling in the magic of unaugmented light.

One quickly learns to fall and roll,
(The pratfall is his stock in trade)
But hard surfaces take their toll,
Although the fall’s expertly played.
He’s just the universe’s tool
Grinning though his blood may boil
A well-placed and convenient fool
(The harlequin’s the perfect foil.)
The passing years have not been kind
(His back is shot, his knees are spent)
But still he keeps the thought in mind
That other wounds are permanent
(He may never bring the house down,
But no one persecutes a clown.)

She simply rolls her eyes and shakes her head
If, on one those rare occasions she is socializing
With social as opposed to business acquaintances
(Daylight hours with single women,
Naturally of a certain laissez-faire outlook as to certain businesses)
Someone brings up the notion of the ****** with the heart of gold;
You do not, speaking in a voice
Residing in the interval
Between a purr and a growl,
Get into the game for the purpose of ministry.
Indeed, she will note
Half-jokingly, half-ruefully,
That the major difference between her job a
And those working the third shift
At the Kendall refinery was the differing nuances
In future health-related consequences.

She is, for a businesswoman,
Possessed of a significant number of quirks,
Having no interest whatsovever
In the abnormal or unduly physically challenging,
Despite the higher potential renumeration
(Honey, you’ll never have enough money for that,
She will demur if the horse-trading turns to such specialty items)
Nor will she engage in congress or commerce
With the upper- management types
From the city’s few prosperous terms
(For reasons she will not nor likely cannot explain)
And she is notably fond,
Possibly to the point of lunacy,
Of lacing her small talk
With scripture and bon mots;  
Indeed, one wall of the men’s room at the Zippo factory
Is devoted solely to various quotes and scraps of verse
She has uttered to her patrons
Who punch the clock at the plant,
And more than one of the boys has said
She’s a pretty **** good piece, even at her age,
But sometimes you wish to Christ
She’d just lay there and be quiet.

It was not impossible that she could have taken another direction,
0r, at least, worked her chosen field on a slightly different plane;
She had been, in her prime, quite stunning
And in possession of both a quick wit and certain presence
That would have nicely augmented the arm
Of those who lived in the rarified strata
(Or at least as high-falutin
As one can be in a small oil-boom town)
Who possessed a combination of money, prestige,
And the inside knowledge that rules and sacred vows
Applied only to sheep and losers.
She chose (a clear and conscious choice, no doubt as to that)
To cast her lot with a humbler set;
The foreman, the mechanic, the assembler on the line
The stooped and gentle florist
Whose sole payment to her was a lifetime of free arrangements
From his small store on Bon Air Avenue
(I tried to lock him into
The floral tribute at my funeral, she once said,
But he seemed to think that would be inappropriate.)

No one, even those in her very small circle of friends,
Seemed to know why she had spurned
The easier road of the demi-acceptable courtesan;
She had given no indication that she saw herself
As some slightly tarnished saint,
One of those so-called angels with ***** faces
(Indeed, she had often made a point of saying
There was no good to be done in her particular line of work),
And she was not forthcoming about her curriculum vitae,
Although it was common knowledge
She was raised a strict Catholic,
And it was said she had a brother
Who was in the care of the state,
Though it was an open question  
As to whether that was in the medium security pen at Foster Brook
Or the bughouse in Kane.  
In any case, as she was want to say
A ***** is the last person you ask
To find the answers to the mysteries of the universe,
After which she would launch
Into a story about how Father Mulligan,
The blustery, movie-Irish priest of her youth,
Was known to be the absolute biggest cheater
To ever set a pair of spikes
Onto the greens at the Bradford Country Club,
Or how the gangster Legs Diamond,
Who would just as soon shoot you as to look at you,
Was known to be the most generous tipper
Ever to patronize the once-grand hotel in Albany
Where her maiden aunt had been,
Once upon a time, a cocktail waitress.

There is, or so I am told, a debate raging
In fashionable rooms and the halls of government
Which concerns snowflakes: specifically, whether each one
Is of a unique and heretofore unknown shape and formation,
Or whether God sees fit to send down identical reproductions,
Like so many Wilton Diptychs being flogged at market.
I have, on the odd occasion, have seen the snow
As it piles up in billowing waves or lumpy bluffs
In the Alps and the Pyrenees,
And, although I lack such learning
Sufficient to dispute the notion of their individuality,
I can say that, in collections of the thousands or millions,
They are indistinguishable from one another,
And, I suspect, all of their like that has come before.

Like so many of her age, barely beyond the blush of childhood,
My poor sister saw her world in stark colorations;
Thunderclouds of black, endless sunbeams of white,
With no room in her orbit’s spectrum for anything in between
(Sadly, she left this life before she could learn to embrace
The beauty to be found in fine raiments of beige, gray, and taupe).
I have buried siblings, buried husbands and lovers,
Buried memories and mistakes,
And in the endless cycle of embrace and bereavement
I have learned of life
That it is the process of accommodation and compromise,
And that it is only dark, austere death
That refuses to give itself unto the joys of negotiation.

It has lately come to pass that the wretched and lovelorn have,
Seeing no way out of their particular predicament,
Began writing my long-dead sister letters
Asking for her advice, indeed her blessing.
Can you imagine such a thing?
The postmaster of Thurn and Taxis (a very old and dear friend)
Has taken to bringing me some of these abjectly weepy epistles.
I’ve long since stopped reading them, of course;
They sing no new song, tread no new ground.
I simply feed them to a good strong fire,
As anyone seeking the aid of a dead young girl
Has already passed beyond the refuge of last resort.

Live in the moment*, we exhort ourselves as well as others,
But such a mandate is a fool’s errand, nothing more,
For all which we endeavor, all we savor and regret,
Are transitory things, snatches of synapse,
Fireflies gone a-gleaming before we can fasten the cap,
All Chinese-checkerboarded with air holes, onto the jar.
So forgive me, then, for not extolling the virtues
Of your laugh, your smile, a certain set of jaw or wrinkle of nose,
For those are fleeting morsels of time,
Mere snapshots, flat and obsolete at the click of the shutter,
Like the crimson-iris inducing Instamatic images of long ago.
Rather let me, then, dwell
Upon the aftermath of these glimmers in time, in your eyes
Those crevices of memory and apprehension
Where the momentary acquires its shading and gradation,
Its context and concreteness, its niche in ones cosmology
Of those things which flutter the surface
Of somnambulant ponds of sleep,
Roiling the stuff of our dreams for better or for worse.