We’re the salty dogs of mo-der-ni-ty,
Robot starfish programmed so expertly
(And we’d like to state most em-phat-ic-ly
There’s no cannibalism in the Royal Navy.)

As we sail the blue waters virtually,
There’s a thigh for you and a femur for me
(Just a wee little joke, as you can plainly see;
There’s no cannibalism in the Royal Navy.)

We sing along to Yanni and John Tesh
Though we’d prefer to have them in the flesh
(It’s their haunting tunes we find quite tasty;
There’s no cannibalism in the Royal Navy.)

We serve the nation and prove our worth,
Map the sewers of Brixton, gnaw on Colin Firth
(He treads the boards in-spi-ray-shun-ly;
There’s no cannibalism in the Royal Navy.)

When our duty’s done and the day is through
We have a most proper naval bar-be-cue
(Though we replace officers most fre-quent-ly
There’s no cannibalism in the Royal Navy.)

The bar squats at the bend in the road where Mill becomes Burden,
Walls somewhat recently painted,
Roof re-shingled ostensibly within memory
A derelict stockade on a front line where cowboy and Indian alike
Have each thought better of standing their ground,
Now defended by a few solitary souls,
Veterans of the days when the place hummed with those
Who’d finished shifts at Troy-Bilt or the Freihofer bakery
(Places either long gone or in the hospice stage,
The bar itself not profitable in any sense of the word,
Opening each afternoon for no palpable reason
Save some madness of inertia)
And who had not moved in with children in Latham or Malta,
Or gone to some frowzy, weedy southern trailer park
Sweating and sweltering through ninety-degree dawns
In Sarasota or St. Pete.
One corner of the building still bears a neon sign
Which sternly announces Ladies Entrance
Though, as the resident wits are fond of noting
Ain’t been no lady on the premises ‘n a month of Sundays,
But, on this particular evening, there is one of that gender
Haphazardly arranging herself on a stool
In search of a compromise between physical comfort
And simply remaining somewhat upright.
She is there in the company of a squat, *****-handed man
Who sits beside her, leering and yakking away
As he signals the bored and ancient bartender
For a couple more Buddy long-necks
(She cannot remember his name—Clyde, Clete,
In any case she’ll assign him an identity later.)
Their acquaintance is of a recent nature,
His end of the deal a burger at the diner on First Street
And a drink or two or three here
(There is a return on his investment, implicit and fully understood,
Though she has not—in her mind, anyway—reached such a point
As it needs to spelled out in plain English.)
She clutches, tightly though surreptitiously as possible,
For she occupies a social stratum
Where placing a death grip on something
Marks it as valuable, putting a bulls-eye
On object and owner as well,
A purse, a three-hundred dollar Coach bag
Bestowed on her by some gum-chomping Russell Sage undergrad
In a random, futile, wholly absurd gesture
(This was some time ago, and the bag, once a fiery crimson
Has faded and the fine leather has creased and mottled
Until it now appears to be a miniature strawberry heifer on a strap)
Though she would note that she was a family of some substance,
Having once attended a fine all-girls school
Where she became engaged
To a professor in the Fine Arts department
(It is unclear whether it was Smith or Bryn Mawr
Or, perhaps, Sarah Lawrence, if anywhere at all,
Her suitors and specters
All but indistinguishable from one another.)
All that, however, is clearly a matter of was;
Her will be is a less fanciful thing,
A measured yet inevitable and precipitous slide
into transactions less palatable
Exchanged for comforts colder than such as she settles for now
(But perhaps not—there is a persistent, palpable pain in her side
Accompanied by a noticeable swelling; Probably benign,
The nurse practitioner had noted at the free clinic,
But she occupied that societal niche
Where further, if unheroic, measures
Were unlikely to be forthcoming.)
In any case, she and her paramour pro tempore
Will call it a night, she pinning her bag to her side
As she instinctively swivels her head to and fro
To ensure no one is seeking to relieve her of her prize possession
(Though its contents are meager—a few dollars in change,
A sweater, a change of underwear,
The whole blessedly insubstantial,
As it is likely she could shoulder any additional load.)

Well, the maps were quite ghastly, you know;
We’d assumed the Frogs would have a pleasure cruise,
All baguettes and brioche, up the straits.
We’d no idea the Turks had dug in as they did,
As the spooks and their charts
Revealed sheer cliffs,
Harmless as Dover.
Nor did we fare much better on dry land,
The topographical atlases we had in the field
Might have been compiled by Mercator himself.
The Turks fought quite well;
One gives them a measure of credit for that, one supposes.
Frankly, we’d have been better served
If we’d just waited for the de rigueur internecine slaughter,
What with the ease they’d hacked each other to bits
Over some ancient family squabble or inconsequential tribal matter
(Can you imagine civilized peoples
Fighting to the death over such trivia?)
I suppose such cruelty and boorishness
Should have not been surprising.
They wouldn’t take prisoners, you know;
Just shot our boys *****-nilly,
With no regard whatsoever to honor or military convention,
Though it should have been no surprise
That the swarthy ******* would not play by the rules.

It’s not like her to knock, of course.
She tiptoes in half-apologetically
(Though the notion of her being unwelcome
Has never crossed her mind)
Regardless of the hour, being likely to show up
At any when and where she chooses, not being subject
To any nine-to-five workaday concerns or constraints.
She declines the offer of a drink, demurely shaking her head
(In her world view, a solitary and un-chaperoned lady
Does not drink in the presence of a gentleman)
Though her company leads me to move from beer to whisky
With some alacrity, for the evening’s entertainment
Is comprised, as it invariably is, of home movies
Featuring my inability to live up to my potential,
My compromises, accommodations,
And outright abdication of principle and conviction.
The scenes, familiar if not particularly welcome,
Play out one more time,
Accompanied by the gentle whirr of an aging Super -8
Or the gentle ka-thunk of a carousel projector
(Her taste in my malfeasance is charmingly retro)
And as the montage proceeds with a weary ruthlessness,
I attempt to explain my role
With well-polished used-car-salesman-issue obfuscation
Or a plaintive, childlike tirade
Concerning the indifference of gods and men
And any and all entities in between.
She is unmoved, silently taking it all,
The corners of her mouth a bit askew,
Sitting in the interval between bemusement and scorn.
Eventually, I slump into my chair, fully chastened
(No, more than that—something deeper, more final,
Something even beyond defeat)
And at some point I grunt
How it would be nice if we could, just this one time,
See what the **** was on cable instead.

There were
children, sweethearts
shared Moscows, Odessas;
I told myself Ready, aim but
not fire.

We’d make the journey, Hannibal-esque in nature,
Either on foot (even on the most dogged of the dog days
When the antidiluvian tar on our side street would bubble up,
Causing our sneakers to make a rhythmic flik-wump
Until we reached those byways deemed worthy of asphalt)
Or in ones and twos on our bicycles,
Our locks, assuming we were not the wards of parents
Who were devotees of the shorn-to-the-skull “summer cut”,
Flying unencumbered in the breeze
As we paid occasional fealty to the rules of the road,
Our destination being the “variety store”
Shoe-horned into one of the narrow storefronts
On our unprepossessing main drag,
A cacophony of canned goods
And candy bars of uncertain vintages,
Novelty pens and girlie mags two-thirds obscured
In jerry-built wooden shelves toggled together
By some former paramour of the frowzy divorcee
Serving as empress of this nickel-and-dime principality.
We coughed up our dimes, hoarded and guarded
With the feigned nonchalance of royal Beefeaters,
In the procurement of Cokes, handfuls of Bazooka,
And always but always trim foil packs of baseball cards,
Which we’d unwrap breathlessly, greedily, hungrily,
Hoping our efforts would unearth an Aaron, a Mays, a Clemente,
But usually our reward would be some utility infielder,
Some second-tier relief pitcher or third-string catcher
Cards perniciously reeking of stale gum,
And one particular summer it seemed every pack
Contained the card of Larry ******* Burchart,
Clad in his full Indians uniform,
Smiling at some untarnished future
Just this side of the horizon, fully visible and all but realized.
At some point, we moved beyond banana bikes and baseball cards
(Our attention turning to pursuits more expansive and expensive)
Giving up children’s things and boys’ games and fanciful dreams)
And looking back, it seems that the smile on that baseball card,
(Ubiquitous as cockroaches at the time,
Now mourned for its absence)
Was more than a touch on the wan side,
That apparition in the distance undefined and indeterminate
Malignant in its very uncertainty.

i.

The sky is, as it was the day before and the day before
And countless days before that, impossibly blue,
Wholly unimpeded by the possibility of clouds.
The hiker stops, taking in the moment, the entire tableau:
Clean lines of mesas rising abruptly in the distance,
The tangible, almost corporeal dryness of the air,
A silence so all-encompassing
As to be almost an entity in itself, and he thinks out loud
How the fingerprints of God’s beauty
Are to be found, even on a place like this.  
His guide, who has simply nodded along unconsciously
Like a dog or hula ******* a dashboard to this point,
Hesitates for just  a moment.
Mebbe so, he says with due deliberation,
Although I’d be perfectly content if your God
Was a little more disposed to look favorably upon humidity.

ii.

Well of course the beach is pristine, the cabby barks,
It never stops raining long enough for anyone to set foot on it.
He lectures his fare, visiting Thomas’ ugly, lovely city on business,
Almost non-stop the entire trip to the hotel,
A litany of woe  decrying decades
Of rising damp, unconquerable mold,
Picnics scheduled in fits of near-lunatic optimism
Invariably falling victim to drizzle and outright downpour,
And, just before he pulls to a stop,
The driver opines I’ve seen Heaven in my dreams,
And it’s a sandy place with nary a gutter or downspout in sight.

iii.

The lake, lovely and Y-shaped
(But deep and silent as death itself,
Holding swimmers and fisherman to its bottom
As closely and tightly as dark secrets)
Is just visible in the distance,
And it is not worth a ****, the glaciers which carved it out
Having left ridges and moraines
Making it impossible to reach with pumps and pipes,
No more useful for irrigation
Than a spigot on the side of a farmhouse,
And so they wait,vacillating between patience and despair
For the rain that will no more come today
Than it has not for near a month now,
A drought that no one
In this part of the Finger Lakes has ever seen,
Even old Jess Bower, who had long since seen ninety come and go
(But he was strangely quiet on the subject, a first as all would attest,
Saying simply Can’t tell ‘bout these things, sometimes)
And most nights the heat of August mocks them,
Stirring with thunder and the occasional bit of dry lightning,
But not a shower, not even a spit to go along with it.

iv.

******* Christ, how can you sweat in weather like this,
But he is soaked, layer upon layer, coat to tee shirt,
Having shoveled twelve, maybe sixteen inches of thick, wet flakes
Which have congealed together in great soggy clumps
Like so many forkfuls of badly prepared mashed potatoes,
The kind of snow that clogs streets and causes coronaries
And brings the kids with shovels strutting hopefully door-to-door,
Shovel yer walk for a ten spot, mister.
As he peels down to tightie-whities and turns on the shower,
He thinks to himself, ****, a couple degrees warmer,
This is all rain, and I am on the couch the last coupla hours.

v.

(Back in the farming country, everyone asleep
in spite of the heat and the long dry,
Only a solitary old mutt dozing on the porch steps
Is awakened by the roll of thunder,
The subsequent splatter of huge drops,
Which lead the dog to rise up
And saunter back onto the porch,
The rain upon his fur making him distinctly uncomfortable.)