I remember, or at least believe I do
(The memories wispy, ethereal,
The stuff of dream or perhaps simple misapprehension)
How I would be half-asleep,
The pro forma repetition of bedside prayers in my head,
Asking for benediction for Grandma and Grandpa
And all the ships at sea
As my father would come home from his lodge
(I forget the mammal in question--****** or elk,
Or perhaps some fictional comedic excuse
Akin to Ralph Kramden's raccoons)
Singing at a volume he believed sufficiently soft,
Though my mother was quick to inform him otherwise,
And the tales of poor Tom Dooley
Or some unnamed tavern in the town
Would intermingle with the remnants of my supplications,
And they would synthesize as some code,
Some argot of some unknown in-crowd
Whose patter was beyond my ken.
My father's songbird days stopped quite abruptly,
And during the proceedings paying homage to that coda,
God was frequently cited, indeed summoned,
And I suspect he tottered earthward,
At which point he proceeded to absent himself
From my further consideration and commiseration,
And I came to such a time where hazy night-time songs
Were part and parcel of my routine,
Though more bourbon-fed than sleep-induced,
And when the talk turned to such things
As the pros and cons of one's patrimony,
I was wont to opine that I was the product of two fathers,
The bequests of whom tended to wax and wane in value.

See that
under the cow?
That holds the stuff of life,
so pick it up and drink, just don't
kick it.

The saving grace of unconventional beliefs
Is that they are usually held closely to one's chest,
Like a poker hand whose possessor
Cannot determine if it is advisable to bluff
Or simply fold and sacrifice the ante
But such reticence is an afterthought
Come the evening's third or fourth Buddy long-neck,
At which time restraint becomes a weakness,
A refuge for losers, and so one of his compatriots
Feels sufficiently emboldened (if not ennobled)
To lecture his fellow stool-mates
On the absurdity, indeed the very impossibility
Of the existence of some higher power,
Some sky-residing guiding principle,
How the whole house of cards
Tottered upon the rickety scaffolding of givens and assumptions
(Reminding him that his negation
Was dependent on a box set of if-then statements
Simply a fool's errand, as he was fully in the grip of mania,
Possessed by the bedrock of his faithlessness)
Not dissuaded by the bartender's admonishing
For chrissakes, Philly, maybe it's time for you to call it a night,
Mebbe go somewhere to tell some kids
There ain't no Santa Claus
So he decided to take his leave instead,
Nodding to those who chose to remain
For the graduate-level portion of Philly's lecture
As he stepped into the street to regard the calm nighttime,
Just the shaving of a crescent moon in the sky,
Hidden now and again by the passing clouds
Dotting and dashing the sky like some unknown cipher
And he considered the notion that all of this
Was the product of some random jumble,
Some rudderless happy accident,
But as he muddled upon the idea further,
He'd thought upon his own voyage
Undertaken with little aforethought to manning the tiller,
And, being all too familiar with the dreck and dross
Of letting things fall where they may,
He was unable to reconcile himself
To all of this being the upshot of happenstance.

It is like shaking hands with a bag of oyster crackers;
Joints sprained, ligaments torn, fingers fractured
And splayed off in several different directions
Like a weathervane that has had a rather nasty shock, indeed,
The whorls of his fingertips, the uneven rise and fall of the knuckles
Serving as a travelogue of a lifetime spent
In towns not quite ready for the big time:
Olean, Oneonta, Visalia, Valdosta, a dozen more besides,
A million miles on buses
Of uncertain vintage and roadworthiness.
Each scar and swelling, each uneven path
Between base and fingertip has a tale of its own;
The ring finger on the left hand first broken
By a Big Bob Veale fastball that was supposed to be a curve,
Later snapped again by Steve Dalkowski,
Who, drinking quite a bit by then,
(When ol’ Steve had put away a few, he notes ruefully,
You didn’t want to hit him, catch him,
Or sit in the first few rows behind the plate)
Most likely never saw the sign
Indicating slider instead of high heat.
The index finger on his throwing hand?  
Well, that was from a foul tip in…Wellsville in ’59?  Walla Walla in ’62?
When you’ve bit up by the ball as many times as I have,
You tend to forget what you tore up when.
Ah, but no such problem with the right pinkie;
That was snapped one cold April night
Somewhere between Winnipeg and Duluth,
During a poker game when a backup infielder
Produced an unexpected and wholly inexplicable king
Seemingly from nowhere.

But those hands!  They were, in the lexicon of the scouts
(The same ones who labeled him
With the dreaded tag of “good field, no hit”)
Who trolled the sandlot parks
And high school fields of his childhood, “soft”;
Indeed, he could cradle a ninety-mile-an-hour fastball like an infant,
And, with the gentlest and most imperceptible of movements,
Turn the wildness of a nineteen-year-old phenom
Into an inning-ending third strike, and even now,
Two decades of bad lighting and jury-rigged equipment
Having turned the topography of his digits craggy and asymmetrical,
They seem as smooth and supple as they were at nineteen,
With all the strength and unsullied smoothness of youth,
As he grips and waggles an unseen bat
In the course of retelling
(In his one brief, glorious spring in camp with the big club)
How he doubled to the gap in right-center
Off none other than the great Whitey Ford himself.

It was late April, or perhaps early May
At the Home for Blind Children
(This was all some time ago,
When one's infirmities were spelled out quite bluntly)
And the children, being set loose
In the resolute glow of the maybe-Spring-is-here sunshine,
Were playing baseball on a diamond-ish field
Wrestled from the goldenrod and crownvetch
Through eminent domain.
Oh, the ball was large, and beeped away like Sputnik,
But it was clearly the game of Cobb and Ruth and Mantle
Just the same, the proceedings ambling on as per usual,
The kids at the plate fixing on the wobbly, blaring orb
Just in time to nick it with their bats
And, with proper and judicious direction,
Traipse around the bases in accordance with the law
As laid down by Abner Doubleday himself.
One of the children, however, inexplicably locked onto the ball
From the moment it left the pitcher's hand,
Driving it in a high arc past the fielders
And over the chain-link boundary
Which had been put up for the Little League teams
A couple of years ago.
Strangely enough, both sighted spotters
Had picked that exact moment to be miles away
From the action taking place on the field,
Perhaps distracted by an unusual bird song,
Possibly formulating plans for their day off,
Maybe even contemplating love yet to be
(It was Spring, after all)
And thus never saw the flight of the ball
As it took flight toward its unlikely landing place.
They spent the remainder of the afternoon,
The sightless and those with varying degrees of vision,
In a fruitless search in the high grass at the edge of the field
And just outside of the foul lines,
Never imagining to look outside of the fence,
As all the while a small herd of cows in an adjacent field
Stared at them impassively,
Occasionally pausing to nibble on the patchy grass and clover
In the exact spots they had grazed the day before

It would be fanciful to believe she wrote the odd couplet
In between exchanging gunfire with some state trooper,
Or knocked off a couple quick stanzas
While hotly pursued by some city police roadster,
Siren wailing and sidewalls straining.
Most likely, they were the product of the down times,
The doldrums between bank jobs,
A time to patch wounds and grab the odd forty winks,
Time given to reflecting upon what had transpired,
More likely that which lurked in some indeterminate future.

As to what lay between the covers
Of those dime-store notebooks
(One wonders how they were procured,
By coins fished from the bottom of some threadbare purse,
Or taken gratis, either brazenly or on the sly)
Their consideration has devolved
Into the love child of curiosity and notoriety,
To be imitated by devotees of her brief romp through history
Or sniffed at by the theses-laden as mere juvenilia,
Though they may grant her a certain if tentative feel for rhyme,
Perhaps acknowledge a joie de vivre in her lines,
But if one reads and perhaps reads again,
Something else comes forth,
A thing which some might argue marks the true poetess,
A rendering of the realization that one's life
Can be full or failure at twenty-three or eighty-three
And that the interval between the two
May or may not be preferable
To the brief flash of light, the brief yet excruciating sting
Which precedes the grim darkness.

These gatherings had become somewhat regular,
A short drive for most involved,
Having stayed behind once the mill closed
(There were the odd out-of-state license plates,
Mostly Florida and the Carolinas,
The vehicles' occupants sporting incongruous tans,
And they were treated with a certain reserve,
As if they had breached some faith,
Had broken some covenant)
And they were invariably in the morning,
Leading more than one wag to note
Well, at least we're all on first shift now.
And the talk outside of Wiegert's,
Shambling old funeral home a little more care-worn
With each generation of the family it fell to,
Turned to such things as Butchie's unusual good luck,
How he'd remained more or less unscathed by the mill,
Losing only the tip of a pinkie finger in a roller
(It was said that, back before the dining room
At the Montmorenci House
Had been converted into a tattoo studio,
You always shook hands with the left and right
To ensure a full set of ten fingers in the grip.)
And how he had, even though he was among
The most reticent of men, been a regular
At the retiree luncheons at the diner up in Wilcox
(The timing of such events subject to certain vagaries
As an infrequent February snow storm
Or the less uncommon changes in ownership)
And how he once explained his presence,
And then only when pressed,
By quietly noting Well, I figger my will-be's
To be a solitary thing, and the only folks
I share my used-ta-be's is all of you good people.