If anyone should ask who I was after I have left this place,
You’ll likely come up with the most self-effacing lie
Convenient to you at that particular moment,
For I was perceived to be an accessory to your greatest mortification,
As such, I could never be more than just a what-may-have-been,
A reminder of a lifetime unfulfilled, unrealized.
Your brother was simply a name to me,
A dimly remembered face
Among any number of names and faces;
But you, oh, you were every word I’d ever sung or spoken,
And I knew every subtle rise and dip in the bridge of your nose,
The shoreline of your eyes, every shade of shadow
The sun cast upon your face.
I could not be what your brother imagined or prayed I was,
What, in fact, you are to me, thus ensuring
I would always be, in some sense, in some sunken corner of your mind,
A broken promise to that broken boy,
A sum destined forever to be in arrears.

Death is most charitable when it is final,
Once the defeated remains of the dearly departed
Have been neatly packaged, the papers filed,
The period placed on the end of the sentence,
For too often it rolls incessantly down the years,
Its effects no less corrosive, its whys and wherefores as insubstantial
As the air that sad boy kicked at in those final moments.
No service for us, then, no “closure”, whatever that may mean,
Only a continual repetition of the door flung open, the strangled cry,
The blackened, bloated face staring at the pair of us, forever separate,
In mute and expressionless indictment.

The place seems somewhat less imposing,
The healing effects of time a beneficence
Denied to wood, metal, and stone
(The high towers bent or fallen,
The chain-link and barbed-wire of the fences
Rusted, unsuitable, merely vestigial)
But it maintains a force, a malevolence
In spite of a certain dilapidation,
Though its physical condition no more than a passing concern
For those who have returned,
As they have matters of a less corporeal nature
Which necessitates a reappearance at such a place:
Some have come in penance for transgressions,
Be they real or imagined,
Some have come to mourn,
For while there are any number of monuments and museums,
There is a dearth of gravesites.
While some have come simply because they continue to be,
Their very presence, their simple act of survival
The essence of testimony.

It has been long since decommissioned and closed to traffic,
The borough choosing not to replace it,
Simply dead-ending the road at its foot,
And most of the populace, casting a wary eye
Upon the crumbling, moss-dappled abutments,
Deign it unwise to walk upon it as well.
He is there most every day,
Regardless of, and perhaps oblivious to,
The meteorological particulars of the moment,
January no different from June or November.
He is, on the odd occasion,
Not the sole visitor to the clanking anachronism:
There are children whom he regards
With a grandfatherly solicitude
Or a well-practiced gruff wariness,
Depending on the age and attitude of the cherub in question,
Young lovers treated with a studious indifference,
Allowing them time and space to trod their well-worn paths,
The occasional generational fellow-traveler,
Stopping by for a brief and mutually proscribed interval,
Each knowing one does not come to such places
For indeterminate and interminable idle chit-chat,
And in any case, they would know there things to be considered,
As he has married and buried,
Has celebrated his muted victories, mourned his plebeian losses,
Accepted his compromises and allowances,
And sometimes he will note the small plaque on one beam,
Noting the bridge's origin in New York's Finger Lakes,
Where benign glaciers made burbling inlets
Emptying into lakes which end up nowhere,
And he will find an odd comfort in the notion
That the sluggish brown old creek flows into the Clarion,
And thence to the Allegheny and Ohio
Likewise the Mississippi and onward to the ocean,
Part and parcel of all things once and forever, amen.

(POSTSCRIPT TO AUTHOR'S NOTE:  As the bit of my brain which allows me to actually complete a piece of writing seems to have gone on hiatus, this chestnut is re-submitted for your approval)


We’d stumbled upon it simply by chance,
Playing on a channel heretofore unknown to us,
Almost as if the remote, in a final, desperate attempt
To escape the CGI-augmented Britneys and Biebers,
Had taken matters into its own hands and steered us there
(Indeed, when we tried to find that channel later,
It had gone a-gleaming, replaced by some lower-case Telemundo)
Presenting no outsized and over-decibeled spectacle
But a stark, quiet, indeed all but silent black-and-white panorama
Where a distinctly un-scrubbed and un-homogenized Santa
Delivers no new cars, no cartoon-mouse vacation cavalcade,
No million dollar prize from some scripted faux-survival experience,
But those things from the realm of the small, the subtle:
A sweater, a meal, a bottle for those not overwhelmed by the contents,
All courtesy of a purveyor of gifts seeking nothing more
Than to provide some measure of comfort and joy
For those who were well short on either.
It all tends toward the romantic and maudlin a bit,
One could contend
(And, indeed, did not the teleplay’s progenitor
Insist on spending his eternity on a lonely hilltop,
In order that he could have an unobstructed view
Of the cold, narrow lake
For which he’d formed such an improbable and irrational fondness?)
And those who take such a position may very well be right,
But it is equally likely that we could be better men in a better place
If the notion that we could rise above
Our tin-can and yowling-tabby tribulations
And embrace that within ourselves which is child-like and yet saintly
Was submitted for our consideration on more than an annual basis.


(AUTHOR'S NOTE: This poem owes a considerable debt to the December 23, 1960 episode of The Twilght Zone.  The episode, entitled "The Night of the Meek", features Art Carney as a decidedly down-on-his-luck department store Santa who receives a helping hand courtesy of Messrs. Serling and Claus.)

(AUTHOR'S NOTE:  This is a re-post of an older piece, but I am inexplicably fond of it, so I thought it warranted being on the line to air out once more.)

This most silent of silent nights
Was no different from any which had come before it,
Nothing at all to mark it as extraordinary or sacrosanct:
The village had long since stopped putting up decorations,
(Lights featuring jolly snowmen and steadfast wooden soldiers,
Now faded, cracked, with ancient and capricious wiring
Impossible to replace and impractical to repair)
Those old enough to harbor warm memories of caroling
Having long since wintered in some southern locale
Bearing Spanish names of dubious authenticity,
Those left behind by circumstance or stubbornness
Very likely slouched behind a cash register or un-crating paper towels,
The Wal-Marts, Kinneys, and Price Choppers,
In a shotgun marriage of customer service and rank capitalism,
Staying open a bit later every year,
Though at least providing the unanticipated benefit
Of one less hour to fret over things unbought,
One less hour to dwell upon promises unmet.

There is some solace, perhaps, in the notion
That the good times were only so good, after all
(It’s been said when the great ditch connecting Albany and Buffalo
Was finally completed, you could already hear train whistles,
Shrill and of ominous portent, in the distance)
And as Barbara Van Borland,
Thrice-married and eternally hopeful,
Opined from her perch at the Dewitt Clinton House,
If you’re gonna fall, better offa stool than a ladder.
Perhaps there is a certain mercy in laboring under the yoke
(Allegorical, but securely fastened all the same) of knowing
That we should expect little and prepare to make do with even less,
That these hard times are the only times we can expect to know.

How, then, do we carry on?  
Follow Pope’s dictum, one supposes,
And say your lines and hit your marks
With as much conviction as can be mustered
As we walk through this land of shuttered country schools,
This forest of plywood and concrete,
Where shoots of grasses and patches of weeds
Rise up through crevices and faults in the neglected blacktop
(But ride out on the back roads of the other side of river,
Out toward Cherry Valley, say, or Sharon Springs,
And see the wide panorama of the valley below,
The hills gently, gradually sloping upward to the Adirondacks,
Creating a vista which would make Norman Rockwell blush,
And you would say My God, how beautiful
If it didn’t seem foolish to give voice to something so patently obvious)
Until that time we are carried gently to that plot
Where we shall lie down next to our parents
In the newer section of the cemetery
Sitting hard by the edge of the sluggish Mohawk,
Where the remnants of by-products
From dormant farms and long-closed tanneries
Mix with the residue of hasty abortions
And the bones of forgotten and un-mourned canal mules.

They have always been among us,
Preening and parading through their brief tenure,
Those acolytes of taking their final bows
While safely in their prime,
Ensuring the photos and screen-shots
Scattered on walls and tables
At their memorial service
Are the remnants of an eternal if truncated youth.
I would (having passed such a time anyway)
Demur to embrace such a notion,
As such an exit strikes me as the final half-measure
In an existence comprised of nothing but,
The process of having left hearts a-flutter,
Cleaved in half yet never made whole,
The tales suitable for guffaws and back-slaps,
But invariably involving merely one protagonist.
I have looked in the mirror, and wanly recognized
The lined face, the thinning and graying patch
Topping that sad apparition,
And I have resigned myself to the notion
That, when I am a thing of the past tense,
My remembrance will be in quieter tones,
The attendees with faulty aortas and rebuilt hips of their own,
And though the anecdotes about my final years
Will be short on notoriety and things
Not subject to the statutes of limitations,
Let it be remembered that I not only loved,
But lived that love as the contented part of a whole,
And that, though those days were not raucous
Nor involved more than one end of a candle aflame,
That I squeezed every **** last bit
Of all that time and tide had allotted.

And so you have come to this immutability,
Delivered by those forces, those fates
(Unseen, perhaps things of our own making,
Unshakeable in any analysis)
Complicit in our preordained rest and rust,
That which made that Ephesian,
Ruefully reading the eternal river
To see there was some eddy, some oxbow
Predestined as the end to his temporary journey,
Deposit his scroll in the great temple,
And such for all of us, then,
The marble chiseled and graven,
Final but for a few finishing touches,
The fate of all men, fated to dust yet invulvnerable,
Shadows brought to the precipice
Of such things which are inescapable
Yet chosen by us nonetheless.