There is a certain shock, not from the silence itself
But of its revelations, the laying bare
Of the utter superfluence of language
In all which unfolds before us, the testament mute
But imbued with all the power of an orchestra
In full-throated fortissimo
Delivered through the panorama of the vast steppes,
The bounty of their Junes,
The desolation of their Januarys
The visage of the doomed Strelnikov,
The darting glances of the chameleonesque Komarovsky,
His eyes scuttling to and fro like dark cockroaches,
And most of all by the unquiet, not-of-this world gaze
Of Yuri Andreyevich, a stare which tells tales
Of how fleeting this world's happiness will be,
How final and inescapable its sadness,
And as he stumbles and falls in his mad, final pursuit
Of a grail which is unheeding, unseeing,
Always just a step out of reach,
The dialogue is not a necessity,
For we have a trove of our own words and experience
To attest to the veracity of the scene in question.

There’s tale upon tale told
In praise of Washington’s Big Train
And the horsehide deeds of Old Pete
Shall be told often and again.
And honest Matty, the Big Six
Hurl’d more than a gem or two,
But they can’t match The Rainmaker
Tossed by Pittsburgh Dan McGrew.

He’d come by train from Keokuk
As green as a patch of clover;
And though he stood ‘bout six-foot-three
Weighed one-forty or just over.
He sauntered up to the owner
Mister Dreyfus? I’m Dan McGrew,
And I am the damnedest pitcher
That anyone has ever knew.

Old Barney found himself amused
By such a gangly cow-town rube
So the boss man and Freddy Clarke
Thought they’d have some fun with this ****.
There’s Wagner—can you strike him out?
His reply left them in stitches.
I reckon that won’t be too hard;
I should only need three pitches.

Oh, so your fastball is that good?
Skipper Clarke said with a chuckle
Don’t throw one, so Clarke said aghast
Can your curve make Hans’ knees buckle?
He shook his head, Nope, don’t throw that,
As he grinned like a wiseacre.
Got just one pitch, that’s all I need,
And I call it The Rainmaker.

They called the Dutchman to the plate
To knock him back to I-o-way
And he swung early and swung late
But couldn’t put one into play
And Wagner grunted, moaned and screamed
But found he couldn’t hit his stuff;
Whatever this Rainmaker was
It sure was plenty good enough.

He tossed the ball twenty feet high
Just a soft lob with a stiff wrist
And a slight twitch of his fingers
To give it just a little twist
Oh, it might swoop like a falcon
Or drift as softly as a dove
And often it would come down wet
From touching rain clouds up above.

The clubs in the senior circuit
Found themselves flummoxed by this lad:
He no-hit the Bees in Beantown
And drove the Cubs and Redlegs mad.
He hasn’t got enough to hit!
They growled in Brooklyn and Philly,
But his ledger said otherwise;
A gaudy twenty-six and three.

The final day of the season
Found the Buccos and Giants tied,
And no one doubted who would be
Taking the hill for Pittsburgh’s side
For New York, Matty took the hill
And both hurlers were simply great
Not one batter had crossed home plate
As the two clubs completed eight.

The Giants bench hooted at him
That beanpole throws like a girlie!
But he got Doyle to pop up
And then fanned Snodgrass on just three
The next Giant to reach the plate
Was the hard-hitting Red Murray
And John McGraw said Now he’s done,
Red will chase him in a hurry.

But Murray tapped the first pitch foul
And missed the second one outright
The Pittsburgh bench now taunted him
Good morning, good noon and goodnight!
McGrew than tossed one up so high
His catcher swore it clipped a bird
And then Dan strolled right off the mound
As not a soul uttered a word.

The old ballpark is long gone now
And those who toiled the same;
That pitch still lives in infamy
As does the pitcher and the game.
The Bucs have had other heroes
With deeds and feats of great renown
But they still speak of Dan McGrew
And his pitch which never came down.

I have often wondered
(Though this one time out of respect for the deceased,
I suppressed the urge to ask the question)
Why in hell preachers never seem to own any old pairs of shoes;
Certainly, they must be cognizant
That the when the Lord brings rain
(Though never when, where, or in the proportion we would like,
His way being not our way and all that *******)
The mud is sure to follow, and yet I have never seen a preacher
Who didn’t approach an open grave in shiny new calfskin loafers.
To say that having a man of the cloth approach
The solemn duty of uniting a man with his Maker
Like he was tip-toeing through a mine field puts a burr up my ***
Is to make understatement ******* near an art form;
I have stipulated in my will that I’m to be buried
Smack-dab in the middle of my cow pasture
(The farm itself, sadly, a bit easier to reach
Once the town—over my strenuous objections, I may add—
Decided it was necessary to pave
My section of the Crow Mountain Road)
So when the time comes for the minister
At the Presbyterian church over in Delhi
To spirit me away from this vale of tears to the arms of Jesus,
Hopefully he’ll do so with good honest cowshit
Splattered on his suit trousers.

Car-di-o-meg-a-ly.
That is, apparently, what old Doc Cathey
Scribbled down on Henry’s death certificate,
Though I suspect he simply picked a page
Out of his medical dictionary
And wrote the first thing that looked plausible.
Given that the man was big as a house and soft as a newborn,
It’s **** near a miracle he lived as long as he did,
And he sure as hell didn’t do anything for his longevity
By taking on the cares and worries of every loser and fool
Like they were so many stray kittens.
For myself, I learned long ago where value lies:
You come up to my place,
I can show you an Ithaca Double Shotgun from the 20s
With the blue still on the barrels,
Worth **** near a thousand dollars now,
And Liberty Head ten-dollar coins
That you’d swear were freshly minted.
Now that, my friend, is the kind of thing
Which appreciates over the years,
And if I die alone and unmourned,
Well, that’s pretty much how I came in,
So I’m more or less ahead of the game.
What killed Henry? Well, I’m no M.D, praise God,
But I figure it was his failure to take into account
That saintliness doesn’t pay off
Until a body’s gone and become past tense.

She had, to be fair, a rather nice voice,
Pleaant in a steamy-shower-and-church-choir sort of way,
So it hadn’t been simply empty patter on his part
The opportunistic language of courting
(Though there was no shortage of that,
But she’d recognized it as such, writing it off
As something she’d deal with later)
And so she would serenade him,
Softly if not just simply humming,
In one of the common rooms
Scattered about the cold cow college they attended,
Or some bench on campus
During the fleeting bits of summer or spring
The land enjoyed before the earth locked-up for the winter,
And later still after the requisite preambles
Involving showers of rice and self-conscious dancing,
Gaily tossed garters and force-fed cake,
Her voice retaining its amiability,
Though often for her sole enjoyment,
As there were late meetings and flat tires,
Out of town conferences and overdue notices,
And in time those nattering bits and bobs
Which required their presence in separate locales
Seeped under the same roof,
Their dinners together brief gulped-down affairs,
The evenings spent in separate rooms
Perched in front of separate screens,
The chasm only breached by infrequent *******
(The process either perfunctory expressions of guilt
Or hopelessly frenetic and ultimately empty)
And she would often don a set of headphones,
Pulling up playlists of the old songs,
Though there seemed to be an emphasis
On those tunes of a rather minor key.

The truck was crushed and dented
Almost beyond recognition
When the county boys reached the scene
(Though, as one of the deputies remarked,
Having seen the vehicle tottering around town
For virtually all his born days
Still ain’t much worse than when it started)
Apparently having slid off the Stamford Road
Then down the embankment
Where it had made an unhappy embrace
Of a utility pole near the old Ulster and Delaware tracks,
A rather unhappy ending to what had been
An arguably equally unhappy existence,
Though old Doc Benner had surmised
The junkman had probably been dead
Before the truck had made the shoulder,
Or so he had said at the graveside service
(He being one of the three or four in attendance
Feeling that one who’d been a common thread
In the existence of so many for so long
Should not go without some commemoration
In this already frayed-at-the-edged little town)
And he remarked that the old man had once told him,
When the doc noted the old saw
That one man’s trash was another’s treasure,
The main diff’rnce ‘tween trash and treasure
Is just a matter of expectation,
And it would have been most poetic if,
After the reverend’s perfunctory hand-off to the Almighty,
The clouds had broken and a thin shaft of light
Had fallen upon the junkman’s stone,
Or perhaps a gentle rain commenced
To heal the disturbed sod,
But the skies remained a slate-gray truculence
As the sexton’s ancient pickup tottered away,
The ropes and shovels tossed higgledy-piggledy
Under an ancient and somewhat watertight old tarpaulin.

It was tossed in a corner of Bobby Lee’s garage,
A length maybe a couple feet long
And pretty frayed up as well, like it had been strained
By some job that it hadn’t been designed for.
In any case, it was clearly pretty **** useless
Fit for nothing outside of a garbage bag,
Though that was apparently out of the question;
It had come to his dad’s possession through his uncle,
Who’d been a deputy sheriff over in Blount County
And, according to Bobby Lee’s father,
Man was fat, stupid, and mean even by deputy standards.
In any case, Bobby Lee had tossed in the trash,
And when his father discovered it missing,
Came as close to giving the boy a hiding
As Bobby Lee could ever remember,
And when he’d protested that it was good for nothing,
Not worth keeping for any reason, his father had answered,
(Rather quietly as Bobby Lee remembered)
Boy, there’s things I’d rather not remember,
And things I **** well won’t forget.

Step lively, now, as good news is not of a mind
To wait upon delay and dithering
Nor to pay any heed to your day's peculiar grace
The ticket for your promised land
Is one-way only, and you need to clutch it
For all you are worth, and travel light;
If it don't fit in a paper sack, you don't need to take it along,
No need for any suitcase
Packed with your yesterdays, your Yes, ma'am,
Your No, sir, your Might I have my pay, sir?
Because your satin-shoes, lose-your-blues,
Done-paid your- dues day comes just once
And once only, so you best move with some dispatch, child.