i. “…THE SAME FORCE AND EFFECT AS AN ORDER OF FILIATION…”

She’d said she wasn’t expecting or demanding a ******* thing
(It’s probably your kid, she said, But I wouldn’t swear to it)
And his buddies swore he was crazier than a ******* rat
To even think about going along with the whole idea
After she all but given him a Get Out Of Jail Free card,
But he’d gone ahead and signed all the paperwork
Which, in the eyes of the state and the child-support folks,
Made him the one true father of this baby-to-be.  
He couldn’t begin to explain
Why he hadn’t fought the notion tooth-and-nail,
Save for the occasional muttered Baby oughtta have a father,
But there was more to it that; he had a vague notion
That knowing half of who you were was worse
Than having no knowledge at all, your whole reason for being
Becoming the exploration of odd hunches and unrealized fears,
The study of every man that crossed your mother’s path
In the hope (or, more likely, the absolute and utter dread)
That you were glimpsing a part of your genetic destiny,
Though such a line of thought was probably just *******,
A product of Genesee Cream Ale philosophizing.
When the time came, he’d agreed
(An idea which reduced his friends
To mute amazement and slow, sad head shaking)
To be present at the birth,
And, after certain undertakings
He’d just as soon not have seen were complete,
The nurse (saying It’s a boy.  A big, beautiful healthy boy.)
Handed him a black-mouthed, screaming little mass,
Fists clenched tightly, entire body tensed
As if it realized just how inadvisable the whole situation was.
Faced with this tangible evidence of his ostensible patrimony,
He found himself unable to say anything except
*******.  **-lee ****.

ii. As The Old Joke Goes, “In The Morning?  
*****, I Don’t Respect You Now.”

He had, of course, forgotten her name,
Assuming he’d ever known it,
And so it had been chica and hija and amada all night,
Though, to be fair, she couldn’t remember
If he was Juan or Jhonny or Jesus;
She simply remembered that he was Colombian,
All dark hair and bright smiles and quite tall
Although that could have just been a trick of the eye,
As his friends were all compact squatness,
Which she had pointed out  while they were dancing,
To which he’d subsequently horse-laughed out loud.
Chica, he’d fairly shouted over the music,
The best way to be good looking is to have ugly friends.
He’d come to Batavia to hunker down for winter
After the wineries had buttoned things up for the season,
Spending his time catching odd jobs here and there;
Anything to get by, he’d said with the most outrageous of winks.  
She’d had no intention, none whatsoever, of taking him home,
But anything to get by takes in any multitude of sins,
Venal and otherwise.
She woke up about two-thirty or so, all damp with sweat
And the remnants of *******,
To see him awake and getting dressed.
Before she could say a thing, he put a finger to her lips.
Shhh chica, he said softly and soothingly,
Like he was trying to hush an infant,
I got some stuff I really need to take care of;
Look, we’ll get breakfast, OK?
You know the Bob Evans out by the highway? Six o’ clock, eh?
And with that, it was a quick, almost brotherly, peck on the cheek,
Then he was gone, so stealthily that she was briefly unsure
That he’d ever indeed been there at all.
Breakfast, can you imagine she thought
As she rolled over to get some sleep,
Like I’m even awake at such an hour.

iii. We Don’t Ask For Directions, And We Sure As Hell Don’t Make Lists

There had been no blowup, no volcanic incidents of infidelity
No grotesque financial stupidity;  
The china and glasses had remained unbroken,
The plaster-and-lath not displaced
By the seismic slamming of doors.
It had been slow, subtle,
Like the slow unraveling of a thread here in there
Opening up a gaping hole in a old comfortable sweater,
Or how the unhurried seeping of water
Would occasionally cause an outcropping of rock
To tumble into the gorges over at Letchworth.  
Oh, there had probably been the proverbial last straw:
Maybe the new refrigerator that didn’t fit through a single door
In the entire house (and who in hell bought something like that
Without taking measurements anyway)
Or the foolhardy extended warranty on the Volvo,
Which had **** near a hundred and fifty thousand miles on it
And had no more trade-in value
Than a Matchbox miniature of the model,
But it any case, the immediate cause
Was probably more symptom than disease, anyway.
He’d packed a couple of bags with the basics
To ****, shave, shower and dress,
And jumped into the ancient but well-protected wagon,
Heading to God only knows where:
His brother in York, maybe,
Or his mom’s place way the hell up in Tupper Lake,
(Not that he had the stomach for the questions and sidelong looks That particular destination entailed)
But about ten miles out he realized
He’d forgotten his ******* bike.
****, ****, stupid **** he said,
Pounding the steering wheel in rhythm;
The notion of going back like some dumb-*** eight-year-old,
All hang-dog look and tail between his legs
Was not particularly appealing,
But the notion of having to **** time
Without the prospect of a bike ride
(Wind in what was left of his hair,
The barking in his calves as he climbed an incline,
The whole **** freedom of the thing)
Was simply too much to consider,
So he swung the car around and headed back.
She was, as he knew she would be,
Waiting in the doorway with the bike
(**** near sharing a brain after all this time, to be sure),
Her face hung with a look not really a smile or frown
Or anything that fit a definition,
But endearing all the same, and he heard a voice not quite his ask
Well, is it OK if I come in for a few minutes?

iv. The Bob Evans Out By The Highway

…the **** am I doing here anyway, she thought,
Staring down at the table, chunky taupe-ish coffee mugs
And logo plates, fine china for everyone and no one,
Set for two (she hadn’t ordered, she was waiting for someone)
The restaurant more or less empty,
Only the odd trucker or  some senior citizen
Who was still on rat-race time.
The clock had hit six-fifteen when she,
Eyes cloudy and threatening to ambush hastily applied mascara,
Was ready to flag down the waitress to let her know
That she was just a coffee, thanks, when he walked in,
No, burst in, like a madness of chrysanthemum
Where there had only been undifferentiated greenery
Mere moments before.
I’m sorry, chica, he said, bending over to kiss her cheek,
This whole life thing gets in the way sometimes, eh?
He sat down, slapping the table with both hands
Man, he said, all but snorting, I could eat a horse,
And what better place than this, mmm?

John Lee Townes nodded sadly, knowingly
From his perch at the Come On Inn
Heard the ambulance boys
Needed two trips to get her out
(But John Lee an untrustworthy witness if there ever was one,
Prone to drunken blackout and sober embellishment
One step from rehab and two steps from the loony bin)
Though the facts at hand
Were short on gore, long on the mundane;
Peggy Rabish (her possessions few, her jewelry cheap)
Was found bruised, but not ******,
Lying in a profane yet oddly peaceful position
Of mock prayer or sleep.
As passers-by gawked,
Whispering inventions, plausible and otherwise,
Concerning jilted boyfriends and rich aunts,
Rummaging through their own memories
In search of credible alibis,
The state boys, diligent and professionally bored,
Secured the crime scene in their yellow-tape fashion.
Suspects?  One trooper barked, ****, just look around here.
****-heads, drunks, welfare cheats,
You tell me who the hell isn’t?
The park manager nodded rhythmically, disinterestedly,
Half-listening as he turned his collar up against the chill,
His thoughts focused in filling this soon-to-be empty lot,
Vacancies and felonies being equally bad for business.

Tanks roll
implacably;
Radio Free Europe
plays “On Broadway”, ode to pawnshops,
pimps, ******.

He'd always been able to slip it on and off,
Puttin' the tux on, as he put it;
He'd often told his wife
(A legit beauty, real glamour top to bottom)
I may be scruffy little ***-*** Walden Cassotto in here,
But once I go outside, I'm Bobby Darin
And I ******* well make sure they don't forget it.
But it was a garment much like the ones he wore
Back at All Boys in the Bronx, a hand-me-down thing,
From some third-tier department store or Army -Navy,
A little too worn here, a little patched too often there,
Unable to mask the real whos and whys and wherefores
Of a decidedly gilded-cage existence,
And while he was musing ad infinitum
Upon the vicissitudes of Sukey ****** and Lotte Lenya,
There there were things going down  
Away from The Flamingo and Golden Nugget,
And begun to suspect that he was on the wrong stage,
So he chucked it all in-- the cars, the studio sessions,
The club gigs, even the sequin-sparkle wife,
Opting to hunker down into a small camper
(A decidedly acoustic model at that)
Eschewing the hairpiece and putting on glasses,
Looking like just one more Summer-Of-Love refugee
Wandering down the coastline
Seeking some pastoral ***-primed epiphany,
And he was looking, suspecting it was more likely
That he wouldn't know it for sure until it snuck up on him,
So he waited, plucking a dime-store six string
In a ratty old lawn chair by the door of the cub camper,
The tuxedo inside, either as a hedge or habit,
Though as he invariably told the occasional visitor
Thing ain't no more empty on a hanger
Than it was on my shoulders.

You’d had just enough change to pick it up at the Hall’s gift shop,

As you’d ate sparsely at the down-on-its luck diner

Where the bus had stopped halfway or so through the trip out

(Just as well, given the place’s obvious indifference

To culinary innovation and cleanliness)

And you’d all but sprinted with it

From the cashier straight o the batting cage next door,

Inadvertently ending up in line for the machine

Which threw curveballs

(The kids ahead of you older, most likely high school players

Who made but weak contact with the pitches,

A dream dying a little with each weak tapper and foul-back)

And you went through a handful of futile swings

Before the final pitch came out of the machine,

Spinning oddly and refusing to break toward the plate,

Hitting you in the back with a dull, rubbery thud,

And your teacher, thick-middle man

Who had played a couple seasons in the Indians farm system,

Where he had faced Juan Pizarro (Son, his hook looked

Like it was coming in from first base)

Chuckled softly as he rubbed your back,

Saying It’s like I told you, kid,

This is a hard game.

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.