Know this—I am well acquainted with the wolf,
Well versed in his ways, his demeanor,
His dispassionate relentlessness,
His pitiless focus on hunt and hunted,
His workaday disdain of pity.
There are those who would laud the mythical Spartan lad
Who hid the wolf beneath his cloak,
Affecting some gallant stoicism
As the beast consumed him without restraint,
But I say to you that is a mere romantic fallacy,
A wanton failure to apprehend the true moral.
I have learned that there is no accommodation,
No covenant to be reached with the wolf,
And any attempt to do so is merely to invite destruction,
And so I choose to engage him openly, without reservation,
Rolling tail-over-teacup in the streets,
Attempting to hold his jaws open with bare hands
While those who find such battle unseemly and uncouth
Jeer and hoot from porch and portico.
No matter, for I will continue to meet the cur on my terms,
For staid suffering in the hopes
Of reaching some accord with the beast
Is the not the act of the noble sage:
It is the mock heroics of the coward,
The sad acquiescence of the simpering fool.

****, they may as well have started holding hands
And making paper dolls together,
The way they carried on
Back in the neighborhood after push came to shove,
Like none of it ever happened:
All the times they spit on us,
The constant **** and ******* and goya,
The ***-kickings if we went one alley too far.
Peace didn’t last; hell, it couldn’t
It’s just the way things have to be, man.
If I ever got in front of some parole board
(Not that I’ll ever have that chance,
As I ain’t goin’ anywhere unless they send me
To Auburn or Attica for some change of pace)
This is what I’d tell ‘em:
You come home to your nice house
In your tidy little sub-development
After a day at Corning or IBM,
And you find out that some punk
Has ******* one of your daughters
And stuck a shiv into her quarterback boyfriend,
What are you gonna do if you find him
Hiding in one of your neighbor’s rosebushes?
Exactly. Save the taxpayers the expense of a trial.

Musta been a year, maybe eighteen months ago,
This bunch of goody-goody types,
All social workers and sweet boys,
Show up here to put on some **** play
Where this guy’s uncle kills his dad
And starts puttin’ the blocks to his mom,
And for hours it’s nothing but yak, yak, yak.
And I’m thinking Man, could you just ice the guy, already.
Let me tell you, I’ve never seen ‘Nardo’s ghost
(Let alone that ******’ ******’s one)
But if he ever shows,
It ain’t gonna be to accuse me of nothin’;
No, he’d smile and shake my hand,
Because I did what the code said you gotta do.  
Just what the code said.

It was the night of the thundersnow,
Meteorological harpie normally reserved for our northern brethren.
She stood grimly at the window,
In wait for a dawn which would not come
Save for the odd light, the incongruous rumbling,
Mock forbearer of those easy languid evenings of August.
She'd made some noise approximating a sigh,
Then returned to undress,
I hurriedly unlacing my boots, removing my pants,
(My feigned nonchalance a foolish, pitiable thing)
And I remember her ******* as  oddly demure,
Her ******* bewitching gumdrops,
The triangle below her waist downy, almost kittenish.
I'd broken her maiden clumsily, eagerly, all unheeding haste.
We'd lain next to each other for a short while afterwards
(The schools already closed for the next day,
Her father recently gone to the boneyard on Ludlow Hill,
She soon to be shuttled off to some spinster aunt in Dillsboro.)
I'd nattered on about summer vacations and thens and laters;
She'd said little, simply studying me with the bemused half-smile
One saves for sad dreamers not intimate with the knowledge
That notions of tomorrow and forever are strictly for suckers,
And as I strolled home come mid-morning,
The sun implacably straddled the sky,
Leaving the sidewalks and shoulders of the road
Completely dry, as if the night before had been a thing
Of perhaps-only, of dreams and tales for a later time.

When you appear (as we all shall, no doubt)
Before the oldest judge in the world,
Take care to notice his appearance;
You’ll see that his robe is frayed about the collar,
And that the cuffs, though expertly repaired,
Are worn and threadbare,
For he has been upon the bench for what seems eons,
(Case files scattered about heedlessly, his gavel mislaid)
And though you beseech him
With your borrowed chants and learned pleadings,
It is unlikely that he shall do anymore than look up imperceptibly
Dismissing you with a short, disdainful wave of his hand,
For your case is like a thousand others,
And your entreaties and supplications
No longer interest him.

I can understand, then, you would find such thoughts
Sobering, Indeed disconcerting;
It is not necessarily pleasant to realize
That we are but as toy boats which,
Once pushed away from shore by some small boy
Soon distracted by other, shinier trinkets,
Drift aimlessly across a pond
Which offers neither shelter nor safe harbor.
We are, then, all on our own,
Misbegotten creatures linked together
By nothing more noble of purpose
Than our own self-interest;
Oh, do not misunderstand me,
For I am not advocating (Heaven forbid!)
Some wholesale violation of commandments:
The spectre of patricide,
The hair-trigger roiling of the blood brought to bear
By the untrustworthy business partner, the faithless lover.  
I merely suggest it is wise to remember
That as we float along the stream of this life
(It being rank and  befouled, chock-a-block
With garbage, broken bottles, discarded condoms)
No hand is on the tiller save our own.  
But enough of this dark and dour philosophy!
Let us finish our draughts and return to our rooms,
There to sleep the sleep of the just,
During this long winter’s night
Which seems all but without end.

They'd lived on the flats, humdrum home in a prosaic town.
Those gabled edifices perched on hilltops
Beyond their means, perhaps,
But certainly beyond their needs;
Their children had cribbed at the foot of their bed
To the detriment of sleep and other night-time activities,
And they'd later shared a room, learning early on
That life was often a make-do vocation,
But could be rife with joys in spite of that.
The kids moved on, to mirth and mortgages of their own,
Their parents resolute in their desire to stay put,
Eschewing the siren song of some trailer court in Sarasota,
Some gator-patrolled condo in St. Pete,
Choosing to confront the seemingly never-ending residue
Of stubborn low pressure systems
Lugubriously wandering up the St. Lawrence valley
For weeks upon end,
The humidity and mosquito-laced all too brief summers
(Though, on those nights where no pop-up thunderstorm
Threatened to chase them back inside,
They would sit on the porch, peering at the gravelly old hills,
And he would whistle some tune from some long ago,
Perhaps pulling her out of her chair,
Dancing a slow and somewhat unsteady waltz
While he did his damnedest to stay on key.)

Once (not that long ago, perhaps, though we likely know better)
The summers were languid, liquid things without end
Each day fully equipped with a high sky,
The blue so all-encompassing, so all consuming,
That lazy fly ***** seemed to disappear
As if God had scooped them up like so many routine grounders.
We played, in a field long since abandoned
To crownvetch and scrub grass,
Twenty one--five points for those *****
The celestial powers had bobbled
And we were able to catch on the fly,
Three points if we took it on the hop,
One if we safely trapped it before it rolled stone dead,
And so our Julys and Augusts fluttered by,
Every bit lazy and aimless as butterflies or knuckleballs,
With the exception of the de riguer tribunals
In which the assembled debated and determined
Where bounce ended and roll began,
Where shoestring catch was reduced to single-point trap.

It all came to an end, of course;
At some point, we crossed a line
(Undelineated but firmly established nonetheless)
Where it was no longer advisable to attempt this at home,
Mere joy no longer an acceptable substitute for proficiency.
Find something else to do, kid, we were told,
And the bats went to the back of the closet,
The gloves and ***** consigned to a spot
(Where we would surely remember to find them)
Behind some canned tuna and Christmas lights,
The fastball blurring by us now,
The field a warren of subdevelopments and cul-de-sacs.

And so you’d forgotten,
Or perhaps just suppressed, the whole notion;
There were, after all, a gaggle of coupon books
With return addresses from an ever-changing confusion of banks,
Sales on pasta and milk, other fees and foundations
Politely requesting ones attention,
So you couldn’t be sure
That it was really the crack of an old thick-handled Adirondack,
Or the comforting thwick of the ball landing squarely
In the pocket of a Wilson A-2000,
Yet when you wandered to the window and peered out,
There they were, looking straight up at you,
Waving their hands like childlike Prosperos
Gesturing to reveal some fairytale glen.  
Come on back, they are saying, and you go down,
Powerless to resist, even if you had wanted to,
Returned instantly, seamlessly to a time and place
Where a shout of I got it! I got it!
Was all the prerequisite or vitae that was required,
And you are unable to bring even mock-edginess to your voice
When you insist I got that cleanly on the hop.  That’s three points.

April is the cruelest month, so some poet said,
Likely vexed to the breaking point by its coquettish nature,
Alternately promising and withdrawing
Sweetness of the warm sun, rustling green blankets of leaves,
The flirtatious, intoxicating perfume
Of the violet and lily of the valley.
For all its coy fluttering of eyelids,
April may delay but never denies,
Yielding its lover’s bounty and then some
To suitors ardent and otherwise.
Its forerunner of two moons prior promises no such delights,
No flora-and-fauna maidenhood as recompense for devotion;
It is the time of purification, of the purge,
A time where light is at a premium,
Often coveted but rarely apprehended, its fleeting manifestations Matters of obfuscation as opposed to illumination,
Soon to be supplanted by fierce meteorological harpies
Short on subtlety but long on effectiveness,
Carrying away those not equipped to resist its peculiar charms
(The too-early runt calf, the aged and nearly-blind collie
Trotting to an unfamiliar field or wood lot,
The newly-solo grandparent acquiescing to the song of the abyss),
The unfortunates consigned to some crypt
Or undisturbed corner of barn or basement,
Proper farewells set aside for some indeterminate time
When it is feasible to block out the knowledge
That the springtime is promised to no man or beast,
Especially at such an interval
Where so little seems to separate one from the other.