Her parentage was a thing of considerable comment
Though a good deal less circumspection,
Mama's identity relatively sure, as everyone knew her mama,
Her father one of a laundry list of unpromising gardeners,
Yet she was a child of grace--no, more than that
An outlier in every sense of the word,
The dazzling unintended consequence
Resulting from a series of unwise and unhappy choices.
She sauntered (though there are those romantically inclined sorts
Who would insist she outright floated,
Her feet rarely if ever touching ground)
By the courthouse in Okolona most afternoons,
And though her dress was from the house of Ralston and Purina
And her jewelry courtesy of Sailor Jack and Bingo,
She neither shrunk nor slunk self-consciously
Nor walked with eyes ablaze and fists clenched,
In a manner asking Mebbe you wanna make sumpin' of it?
Simply walked her own walk,
Such things as poverty and pedigree
Trvial matters beneath her concern,
Though she was always provided for, as a seemingly chosen child,
Judge Hibbard giving her a store-bought doll from Jackson
When she turned seven, others providing her pop and bubble gum,
And later Miss Lucille Brisker sewed her a bright-blue silk dress
Plus gave her forty-two dollars for a Greyhound ticket
To Los Angeles via New Orleans
(When she hopped the bus in front of the K &B,
She gave her a peck on the cheek, and said
Miss Lucille, you take care, but I doubt
I'm much likely to pass this way again.)
Her whys and wherefores after that were lost to time and tide:
Perhaps she made it in L-A, perhaps she thought else-wise
And hopped off the bus in Hattiesburg or Bogalusa
Though most were of the opinion that it mattered little if at all,
As she allowed them, leastways for a little while,
To be in her orbit while she shone in such a manner as pleased her.

He’d never read him, understand,
At least not that he’d remembered;
Might have half-skimmed something in Look or Esquire,
But he certainly wasn’t much for novels,
And there were kids to raise to rise, a war to fight
(His platoon had been pinned down at Anzio,
Leaving him precious little time for dispatches from the front,
Save  for a  singular postcard
He’d bought in Netunno on a rainy April afternoon,
On which he’d scratched Babe, I’m still alive and kickin’,
Worth ten thousand words
To a harried, frightened seventeen-year-old,
With one in the cradle and one on the way),
But then all that was later on, or earlier
Depending on where you stood,
Time being a lazy, molasses-unhurried thing to him now,
Like the leisurely old Owasco Inlet which ran through town,
Seeming to go in no direction in particular,
Running north or south as it deemed fit at the moment.
Once, he’d worked at the typewriter plant on Spring Street,
Fashioning hammers and slugs for Standards and Silents
And, later on, the electric Coronets and Model 250s
Until he packed it in with forty-five years under his belt,
Though all that pretty much the stuff of memory as well:
The factory gone a couple years now,
Rubble carted away, leaving an angry brown patch of land,
The last generation who’d worked the plant
Having up and left, by and large,
In most cases taking his generation with it as well
(Factories tending to be family affairs,
So many of his contemporaries unwilling to be so distant
From children and grandchildren,
Such notions being unknown in company towns)
Leaving the place a touch foreign,
A bit alien to folks who stayed on,
Men without a country as it were, doing their level best
To navigate waters without landmarks, without buoys,
Trying to reach harbors of questionable refuge.

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.)