We are all machines that eventually show wear;
Here and there a spring will sag, the odd stitch will tear.
The imprudent man tries to restore the defaults.
(The perfect love song is a listing of your faults.)

Do not try to scold us, or hold us in contempt;
We will not be trained beasts--it’s unwise to attempt
To make us jump through hoops or perform somersaults
(The perfect love song is a listing of your faults.)

It’s unwise to ignore me, or choose to consult
Someone who thinks otherwise—I’ve seen the result!
The odd homicide, the occasional assaults.
(The perfect love song is a listing of your faults.)

If you value hearth and home, you listen to me.
(Ignore at your peril—only advice is free.)
The moral of our tale resides in morgues and vaults.
(The perfect love song is a listing of your faults.)

And so we offer what we shall,
Sometimes in tune with the season
For those of us of the Christmas-and-Easter-visit-to-the-pews set,
Sometimes in the seeking of some benediction,
Other times for things less tangible,
A certain haunting or hunger not subject to definition.
They are, by their natures and ours,
Unremarkable things of humdrum origin,
For we are not of that stratum
Where our munificence is duly noted
With testimonial dinners or staid brick campus buildings
Bearing our patronymic on some plaque,
For we are but the most minor of the magi,
Our alms likely to thump wanly
At the bottom of small cardboard box
Or rattle thinly on some plate,
And we can only hope that we are judged
With an emphasis on intent over content.

Her woe is a workaday thing,
Not the product of catastrophic illness
Or some wanton random tragedy;
It is simply the occupation of a certain stratum,
A predetermined prank of birth,
A random assignation to such a place
Where the world is a middling mid-week place,
With no illusions of weekend soirees
At some overwrought bungalow on the coastline,
But she will, if such an opportunity presents itself,
Wander down to the narrow refuse-cluttered public beach
And remove her scuffed and patch-stained old sneakers,
Taking a few precious moments to sit by the water's edge
To bathe and soothe the soles of her feet.

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.)