It was an unornamented, workaday kind of place,
The type of hand-to-mouth concern
Scattered all through these not particularly grand towns
Tethered onto the old Grand Army Highway,
(Each interruption in the amalgamation
Of tight turns and gently stoop-shouldered hills
More or less the same, the only variation being
The extent to which the main drag was not what it once was)
A collection of the detritus and left-behinds
Of a place a comfortable preponderance of its denizens
Had found it prudent to leave in the rear-view mirror
Though the contents wherein more of a regional nature,
Old Duquesne beer signs and Penn State football programs,
Souvenirs such as Adelphia Cable jackets
Or 1954 Guaranty Paper calendars
Too painful or too precious to be put up for sale,
The edifice itself a gerrymandered concern,
Rooms created from dividers and acoustic wall panels
Yet unable to hide its giant single-room past
As some small manufacturing concern,
A machine shop or ancient tannery,
Telltale signs of ancient and abruptly capped plumbing
Incongruous fuse boxes and gas connections
Peeking out unobtrusively here and there.
We’d picked out a couple of bits and bobs,
Haggled respectfully but not aggressively
And swung the car back onto the main road
Heading west to Port Allegany,
Hoping to catch breakfast at a diner whose Yelp reviews
Lauded the quality of its corned beef hash,
Though we found the place shut tight,
A sign hopefully noting Temporarily Closed for Renovations
Yellow-taped and fading stuck fast to the front door.

The story is in Grimm’s ancient tome
Of the girl who wove straw into gold
Bamboozling the evil, gnarled gnome
With subterfuge both cunning and bold.

Sing songs of cold tea in Styrofoam
And rude brown bread, dry without butter;
She knows no carriage nor castle home
Awaits the princess in the gutter.

The dwarf chose not to concede defeat,
Rightly convinced that a deal’s a deal;
Filings and pleadings finally complete,
The circuit court to hear the appeal.

Sing songs of cold tea in Styrofoam
And rude brown bread, dry without butter;
She knows no carriage nor castle home
Awaits the princess in the gutter.

The panel’s judgment swift and direct;
The lower court had most gravely erred.
Petitioner may rightly expect
Payment plus damages, they concurred.

Sing songs of cold tea in Styrofoam
And rude brown bread, dry without butter;
She knows no carriage nor castle home
Awaits the princess in the gutter.

Bailiff took heir and inheritance,
Leaving nil which could be sold or pawned,
The king’s glances gave full evidence
The scapegoat would be a clever blonde.

Sing songs of cold tea in Styrofoam
And rude brown bread, dry without butter;
She knows no carriage nor castle home
Awaits the princess in the gutter.

There was no chance she could be returned
To her former home life in the woods
The miller’s girl, derided and spurned:
She’s a beauty, yes, but damaged goods.

Sing songs of cold tea in Styrofoam
And rude brown bread, dry without butter;
She knows no carriage nor castle home
Awaits the princess in the gutter.

A room in Amsterdam’s red-light tract
The former princess is on the game.
Still works under an implied contract;
The terms, however, not quite the same.

Sing songs of cold tea in Styrofoam
And rude brown bread, dry without butter;
She knows no carriage nor castle home
Awaits the princess in the gutter.

We raise them well enough to a point,
These children sprung from our fancy and gray matter,
But they often prove unruly and recalcitrant,
Immune to both wise counsel and outright admonition
And so we exile them to some corner
Until such time as they are willing
To acquiesce to cooperation and a certain conformity,
Where the remain as sullen accusations
And though we scorn them as obstinate failures,
We give into (at least, in our quieter moments)
The suspicion that their shortcomings
Lay much closer to home.

Proffer
the moon, and stars
As love-tokens; I give
you dirt from near this undisturbed
rose bush.

You’ll not see their like come race season,
Having left the premises to be replaced
By the preening breast-augmented and face-lifted set,
Shaking their heads and clucking sadly if one inquires
If they might have something
A touch smaller than a Franklin in their wallets,
Their smooth patter, replete with references
To Paris junkets and Milan catwalks
Occasionally interrupted by one of their more prosaic counterparts
(Hard-core players following the nags up from Belmont)
Stopping in to partake in one vice they’d sworn off earlier
While loudly disclaiming the other which had ruined
An otherwise perfectly lovely afternoon
(They’ll down their draughts in short order,
Most likely headed for the harness track
To drop a twenty on some longshot
Which bears the name of a long-departed grandmother.)
This time of year, though, they are ubiquitous
As the black and salted slush,
Sad souls slouching in after a bracing walk from Skidmore campus
Or some down-at-the-heels apartment on Alger Street,
Forlornly popping into some quiet booth
With the familiar long-distance stare seen in those
Beginning to grasp the truth that one
Is an object of prey in a very small pond indeed
(Likely a semester, no more than two certainly,
From having their undergraduate epaulets
Torn unceremoniously from their shoulders)
Being as quiet and unobtrusive as church mice
Until a half-dozen or so Coors Lites
Leads them to pontificate on the injustice of the universe
And if they have not decided to stagger home
Or degenerated into desolate tears of self-pity,
They are wont to dispute the existence of the Almighty,
Saying with a conviction which would be impressive
If expressed by Beelzebub himself
That he does not exist, that he cannot exist,
Though the body of proof cited in support of the proposition
Tends to be fragmented and rife with circular reasoning
(We know that they’re most likely drinking with false ID,
But they are invariably pedestrians—let them have their moment,
Only threats to themselves, after all.)
As for myself, I’m of the opinion that faith in the Hereafter
Is that rarest of bets, an absolute bet-the-chalk- dead- cert
Where you walk to the betting window clutching house money.

That thing of varied tangibility,
Be it the West or the frontier or whatever,
Has long since gone a-gleaming,
The time when it was still proper
To pay ones respects
Having passed beyond memory itself,
Those phenomena so elemental,
So deeply interwoven in our days and fates
They were bestowed monickers of their own
Now simple chemical reactions and natural curiosities
Familiar and easily explicable,
Yet as we apprehend those still, starlit skies
Which engendered such wonder in our forebearers,
Our understanding of the heavens
Has not left us any less lonely or forsaken
Than those sad men on horseback
Who whispered a name plaintively into the zephyr.

It is a workaday task
Performed in the service of equally workaday people:
A bland smile, a benign greeting,
The quick review of hastily taken skeletal notes,
The fixing of the apparatus, an approximation of eyewear
Fit for some black-and-white-serial robot,
Upon sundry bridges of sundry noses,
And thence the reading of letters,
Done with an easy sure-footedness at first,
Then imperceptibly yet inexorably more hesitant
Until such time they are no long able
To decipher what is before them,
The shapes devoid of meaning,
Hopelessly beyond their ken,
And at such a time he begins to finagle lenses and settings,
Until such a time where the occupant of his chair
Regains equilibrium and pronounces his sight
Sufficient to the task at hand,
But there was one occasion when, inexplicably,
The patient stiffened in abject terror,
Relating in clipped, anguished words
That all he saw was light, nothing but light
Subsuming everything in its presence.
He was able to restore the lenses to such a fashion
Where the figures before him were reasonably familiar,
But as he excused the patient from the chair,
He found himself wishing ruefully
That he knew some grinder, some technician
Who could have fashioned eyewear
To the specifications which had elicited such a reaction.

The basement sported the requisite folding metal chairs,
Each of indeterminate age and reliability,
One wall featuring a poster of a standard-issue Jesus,
Implacably serene, ministering to a flock
Of equally generic and cherubic children.
An ancient coffee table, suitably gouged and graffitied,
Sat off to one side,
Encumbered with ashtrays,
Styrofoam cups of varying degrees of emptiness,
And the remains of a bundt cake
(Store-bought, the evening’s dessert designee
Not up to the challenge of having her baking skills
Being yet one more thing held up to the light for judgment.)
The tales were standard issue bottle-done-me-wrong-song fare:
Jobs lost, marriages torn asunder, children estranged,
Plaintive tunes sung by the usual suspects
(The weak-chinned with haunted faces, the closeted gays,
The intense silent types still in the full bloom of denial.)
There was, this particular evening, an extra folding chair
Sitting unused off to the right,
Normally occupied by a compact, muscular sort
Who, when not furiously scribbling notations
In an ancient stenographer’s notebook,
(This habit earned several looks-that-would ****
From some of the long-term habitués of these meetings,
Who felt he was making some speakers a bit reticent,
Considerably reducing the sessions’ entertainment value)
Observed the proceedings intensely with ****** expressions
Alternating between schoolboy grins and bailiff-stern frowns.

Some weeks prior to leaving the group, his demeanor changed;
The notebook left at home, the sine waves of emotional extremes
Exchanged for an easygoing, almost beatific smile,
He’d sit with hands behind head, leaning backward in his chair
(The rubber tips of the chair legs making a soft tap, tap, tap
As they lifted and settled back onto the floor),
Letting the weekly affairs roll on
As if they didn’t concern him in the least.
His sponsor had been, understandably, somewhat taken aback
By this sudden sea-change in attitude,
And was further nonplussed by the response
To the polite inquiry as to this change in heart.
I’ve discovered to the secret, the sponsor was informed,
All of it, every last **** thing that’s said every **** week
All due to sadness--and I know that all I need to do
Is not to cause it for anyone else, and not feel it myself.
I’ll never need to drink again, he said with a smile
That would not have been out of place among the angels,
And he turned and walked away,
Never to attend a meeting again.

He may have been right
(For whom among us could say for sure he was wrong?)
But, as it turned out,
Sadness was not the type of adversary
Which was of a mind to come out and fight like a man;
It lurked in dark corners, and was apt to come at you
From all directions and at all hours,
Nor was it averse to enlisting loved ones and total strangers
In the furthering of its cause.  
He’d parried and ****** at these shadowy antagonists
(Though his exertions and exhortations were,
Often as not, directed at nothing more than thin air)
With increasing frustration
And diminishing certainty as to his beliefs,
And at some point he supposed that his effective weaponry
Was reduced to a sturdy chair, strong rope, and solid roof beam
(The landlady found him just a bit too late,
His toes rhythmically drumming against the apartment door.)

The long evening of sighs and serenity came to a close,
Goodbyes and small talk wrapping up in short order,
And the participants walked up the stairs from the basement
(One or two members nodding, perhaps in reverence,
Possibly in whimsy to the picture of the Son on their way out)
And a few of them made mention
As to how much darker the evenings seemed
Now that fall was slipping away toward winter,
And how nice it would be if the parking lot was better lit.

It is, in its own fashion, a ballpark—there are dugouts,
(Though more kin to lean-tos if the truth be told)
A fence with advertisements, though its paint is cracked and faded,
And some of those firms testifying
To being tops in collars and canned foods
Have long since changed names or flat-out gone under,
But a ballpark nonetheless, and if you squint your eyes
Or find some other convenient method of self-delusion,
You can convince yourself it is a rather fine thing,
Happily oblivious to the fact that the infield
Is all bumps and tiny moraines
Covered with crownvetch and chickweed masquerading as grass,
The outfield rife with bark scorpions
Who frequently wander inside the lines.
Milling about this somewhat-short-of-pastoral greenish patch,
Wearing uniforms of a reasonable homogeny,
Is a curious, potentially combustible group of men:
Honest-to-goodness big leaguers whose off-field proclivities
Led Judge Landis to excuse them further participation,
Rope-muscled miners from Bisbee,
Carbide-lamp helmets tucked under their arms,
Callow boys taking a chance on this decidedly last-chance town,
One or two others with tangibly acute reasons
For staying in close proximity to the Mexican border.
Holding court in the midst of this collection
Is a man whose face was not visited by the smallpox
As much as it was wrapped up in its full embrace;
It’s old Charlie Comiskey who should be in jail, he grumbles
Man has more money’n he’ll ever need,
Hell, more than Stoneham or Ruppert.
No reason in the world he couldn’t pay his boys a fair wage,
But he treated ‘em like dogs, and if you starve it long enough,
Why, even the most loyal dog will turn on a man,
Ain’t that right boys?, and a pair of his listeners,
Men named Chick and Swede
Who know of Comiskey’s parsimony first-hand,
Grimly nod their heads in agreement.
The speaker pauses for a moment, and as he does
He produces, seemingly from nowhere, a hip flask
(Brought forth like a seasoned magician
Pulling flowers from some gauzy handkerchief,
Or a card sharp finding an extra king in the very air itself)
And takes a long draught before continuing.
Look, I love this game--hell, no man loves it more
But it’s still just a **** game,
Just entertainment, like a circus or a rodeo.
Maybe we a took a few liberties with a game here and there,
But, you know, I knew folks who’d see the same Broadway show
Three, maybe even four times;
They knew how it would turn out, I reckon,
But it didn’t keep them from spending four bucks a ticket.
Well, what’s a ballplayer but an entertainer?
We still put on a good show, and no one gets hurt,
But because it’s a ballgame, you’d think we’d spit on the cross.
With this, the circle breaks up, and men head to spots on the field
To field lazy fungoes and toss the ball around the infield,
And most of the on-lookers soon head back toward town
(Perhaps back to work at one of the smelters,
Their stacks blowing forlorn clouds into otherwise endless skies,
Or maybe to one of the sad houses on the far side of town
Where haunted-eyed Mexican ****** mechanically light candles
In supplication to saints whose efficacy they’ve come to doubt)
But the stragglers who stay behind are treated to the first baseman
Make a marvelous, almost magical, pickup of a short-hop throw
With the easy nonchalant brilliance which at one time
Brought hundreds, no thousands, of men to their feet in disbelief,
And as he sweeps his glove upward, he laughs
(Though with just a touch of restraint, a trace of the rehearsed)
And says See, boys? Once you are big league,
You are always big league.

It wasn't that he didn't remember the lay of the land;
Hell, knew it as well as his own name,
(Even though, he noted with some disquiet,
The pavement had crept a bit farther up Bootjack Hill,
And there was a driveway or two,
Not to mention the odd electric meter,
That hadn't been there some years before)
But there were considerations now,
Things which needed to be taken into account
Which, in his days of rattle-assing in these hills
In his third-hand '75 Nova
(Last of the Rochester straight-sixes,
As so many bottles and cans raised in tribute noted
Before he sold it to some kid from the neighborhood
For fifty bucks, probably forty more than it was worth.)
Had been under his radar, if not beneath his contempt,
But he wasn't driving a beater with a cracked manifold now,
And his hips and knees were less than amenable
To changing a tire on a narrow strip
Of packed dirt and gravel,
And if you moved at more than a snail's pace up there,
You could bust a brake line in short order,
And if even you could walk to a point
Where you had cell service,
You had to convince someone from the garage in town
To send someone up to those hills
(He could just imagine someone on the other end
After an incredulous pause saying
You up where, now?)
And he'd decided to tuck his car
Into one of those **** new driveways
(He'd have just K-turned it back in the day,
But he knew those culverts were deep and serpentine)
And headed back downhill,
Reaching the Irish Settlement road
(Itself only paved completely back in '84 or so)
The drone of the tires on the tarmac
Faintly irritating and mosquito-like.

There is always the fire,
Whether in the charcoal sketches
Or the scattered canvases, each shunted off to the side
In various states of incompletion
(He offered little clue as to why each was seemingly abandoned,
As he seemed reasonably content with them
In terms of composition and technique,
Suggesting there was something else that eluded him,
Something he had misapprehended)
An all-encompassing conflagration
Which promised the eventual envelopment
Of all in its path, flesh and façade,
Mortar and muscle,
Yet the assemblage of waiters, telephone operators,
Delivery boys and meter maids
Do not, by and large, exhibit the expected terror;
Oh, it is there now and again,
Mixed in among those who would,
With a certain madness in their gaze,
Exhort the torch-bearers onward,
And there is the odd face who regard the whole undertaking
With an unmistakable glee,
But, by and large, there is a matter-of-factness about the figures,
Varying between grim determination and an utter sang-froid,
And when one of the select few he has showed the preliminaries
Noted how he'd expected the dried brush and ground cover
To burst into flame on a more-or-less daily basis,
He looked up from his pencils and grunted
When it comes, the brush won't have a ******* thing
To do with it.

An old boy named Billy Joe Clyde
Took hisself a lovely young bride
But he had several vices
Plus herbs and secret spices
And ate the lass Kentucky fried.

He'd made what he'd believed the requisite sacrifices,
At least mildly painful but fully necessary,
Striving to keep a certain arm's-length objectivity
In order to carry out his craft
So that it was not tainted by sentiment,
Detachment serving as antiseptic,
In the hopes divining the purposes of God or whatever,
And thus giving it the proper exposition,
So he'd set about the process of finding some celestial thread,
Traipsing both interstate and back road,
Standing forlornly before crumbling Catskill hotels,
Abandoned bath-houses and resorts in Sharon Springs,
The sarcophagus-like state office building in Binghamton
(Hopelessly poisoned before it could ever be occupied,
Casting a baleful shadow over the city's ragged downtown)
The remnants of the Strand over in Ithaca,
Once beautiful lady of vaudeville
Now nesting-place-***-latrine for pigeons
Cooing and trilling at him insistently,
As if they spoke some code he must be able to cipher,
The sprawling auto graveyard
Cradled in the elbow-crook of an on-ramp in Cortland,
The black-eye front ends of ancient Buicks and Datsuns
A series of inscrutable crossword puzzle rows,
All of these things whispering intermittently to him
But providing no revelation, save a gut feeling
That the epiphany he sought was forever beyond him,
And in the mad act of a man beyond dejection,
He pulled his car into some sad rest area,
No more than a picnic table and a port-a-john,
Wandering over to the edge of the scrubby woods
Where teens fornicated and drunks urinated,
And pulled up a fistful of ragged flowering weeds
Pulling of the petals one by one
In the manner of some sad, jilted, loved-then-unloved juvenile
Contemplating how deeply he dwells among the forsaken.

Love is just a thing to shred and rend our hearts,
So Dusty Springfield asserted from her knees
(But, to grow a tree, you don’t start with tree parts.)

The flow of passion deepens in fits and starts,
And does not walk the tidy path of our pleas.
Love is just a thing to shred and rend our hearts,

Till-death-do-we-part tortures spinsters and tarts
The rice a mirage, the wedding march a tease.
(But, to grow a tree, you don’t start with tree parts.)

It ignores the primacy of graphs and charts,
Choosing its own time and moments to seize;
Love is just a thing to shred and rend our hearts,

Love at first sight upsets all our apple carts,
Yet we rush headlong to pick it from the trees.
(But, to grow a tree, you don’t start with tree parts.)

One more torch song, then, to rocket up the charts.
One more tear-stained chanteuse to sing the reprise;
Love is just a thing to shred and rend our hearts,
(But, to grow a tree, you don’t start with tree parts.)

We knew the place better than we knew our homes,
Each scratch and warped spot on the bar,
Each tear and repair in the old-school upholstery
On the ageless stools,
Each story behind the bats, jerseys, boxing gloves
And the other souvenirs whose origin and the stories behind them
(A man of the world, old Pop McLafferty would say of himself,
Though the only time he’d been outside Elk County
Was a desultory two-year hitch
Spent in one of Mother Army’s more decrepit West Texas camps)
All being  of dubious authenticity;
Take those gloves, Pop would say, Got ‘em in Cuba one time.
Belonged to Hemingway, ya know.
He and the old Dodger pitcher, Hugh Casey,
They’d spend all day shooting clay pigeons
And drinking cases of Hatuey Beer 'n go home
And beat the living hell out of each other with those gloves
Until Papa’s missus couldn’t take the splintered wicker no more,
And though we knew **** well he’d bought the gloves
At the Sally Army thrift store up in Coudersport,
We kept our own counsel,
As we’d bent elbows and spewed ******* there
Since we were old enough to drink
(Earlier, in fact, as we ran with Timmy McLafferty,
Who later inherited the place,
The largesse of death being the only way
He’d ever have the wherewithal to own a bar)
And the place remained a constant
Through all those things we’d failed or had failed us
(Girlfriends, wives, parents, even our spots on the line
Once the Montmorenci shut down.)

This night, then, was no different than most,
The normal rituals being observed,
Most of them at the good Timmy’s expense,
As his positions both behind the bar
And in the cosmic order mandated such,
This particular evening the determination having been made
By unanimous ballot that Timmy had never, in fact, been kissed
(Not as preposterous a notion as one might think,
As he had made the transition from “hefty” to “fat *******”
Quite some time ago.)
He’d taken our potshots with the good-natured stoicism
That were part and parcel of his character and his role,
Until he piped up—C’mon fellas, I was engaged at one point.
We’d responded with any number of speculative notions
As to said fiancée’s deficiencies and possible species,
Until Timmy said, with borderline belligerence,
Look, I’ll show you a picture,
At which point he produced a creased three-by-five snapshot
Of a blonde who looked very much like a 1980’s –issue Ellen Foley,
Thus occasioning speculative comparisons
Between Tommy and Meat Loaf,
With the subsequent rumination
As to what this poor girl would have tasted
Had she stuck her tongue down Tommy’s throat
In Paradise-By-The-Dashboard-Light fashion
(The consensus being Subway BLT, varied flavors of Cheetos,
And three-hour old Tullamore Dew.)
We’d expected, naturally, that Tommy would laugh along with us,
But he slammed a tray of glasses down on the bar with such force
That one or two of the glasses liberated themselves
And shattered noisily.
He’d gazed at us with the pure, holy fury
Which usually proceeds the mother of all riot acts,
But he apparently decided that there were pearls and swine
And there was no sense mixing the two.
Why should I waste any more time on you sonsofbitches,
Buncha ******* can’t see past the bottom of your glasses anyhow,
And with that he stalked into the back,
Ostensibly to grab mixers or pretzels
Or some **** thing, and we sat still as church mice for a moment,
Until someone looked at the TV, and said ******* Sixers,
All upside and never deliverin’ the goods,
and we nodded in agreement in the manner of those
Who do not see, hear, or say anything untoward.

It was back in…hell, must have been seventy-six?

Anyway, I was livin’ up around Bolton Landing

And doing some odd jobs (some very odd, indeed,

But that’s another story for another time)

At the Sagamore—big fancy hotel on Lake George—

When I started hearing people runnin’ their pie-holes

About this crazy-*** pigeon.  

Folks were saying the **** bird

Had somehow got ahold of the idea

That it was a ******* hawk or falcon,

Swooping down like it was after rabbits or field mice

Instead of bits of bread, and some of the old-timers

(Most likely addled by the years, or maybe having lived alone

For just a little too **** long)

Swore on the gravesof their dear sainted mothers

That they had seen it do full-out barrel rolls.



Well, little towns are all about big talk,

So naturally I wasn’t about to put much stock

In this particular rural legend—but one day

I’m walking around downtown,

And I see this chunky blue-gray blur tear-assing

Down around my pantleg for a bit before it leveled off

And started to climb, throwing in a couple of three-quarter turns

Just for ***** and giggles.



I saw that **** thing do its stunt flying

Several times after that:  loop-de-loops, death spirals

And a few more power dives, just to scare the women and children.

That old fool bird was pretty scuffed up and worse for wear

From its acrobatics—after all, it was just a pigeon

And it could daredevil from sunup to sundown,

But that didn’t mean it was likely to turn into no Blue Angel



The third, or maybe the fourth, time

I happened to catch the bird’s act

I caught a glimpse of its head, and I swear to you,

On all I hold true and holy, the bird was…grimacing,

Like it was just plain sick and tired of all the limitations

That nature had foisted off on fat, ungainly creatures like itself.  

Some days I would walk past the old McEachern place,

And I’d see that bird perched on an old, mostly-collapsed barn

Just staring at the cloud cover hiding Mount Marcy

(Where eagles lived in the crags,

Breathing the rarified air that pigeons,

Skimming the rooflines of strip malls, would never know.)



After a few months, folks stopped seeing the bird

And his wild-*** air show.  

Maybe it had been a bit slow

On the uptake while pulling out of a dive,

Or perhaps it finally came around to the notion

That a pigeon was, after all, just a pigeon, no more and no less.

Hell, maybe it set off for the High Peaks after all.

I’ve read that the ancients would read the entrails of birds

In order to tell the future, and maybe they could,

But in my book, ignoring the sweep and swoop of flight

And the mysteries of why-they-do-what

So you can ponder and mull over

The collection of bugs and gravel in its guts

Says about all I need to know about the notion of wisdom.

Consider, if you will, the fullness of all
Which Nature has made, seemingly infinite in variety
Its endless permutations randomly arrayed
In such a manner that science and piety
Would concur that its bounty is to be enjoyed
For nothing more than its boundless, lovely inscrutability
Yet its works exhibit a consistency
To be employed in the service of mankind,
A felicitous though unacknowledged design
Enabling the manufacture of such potions,
Such poultices designed to bend the wills of men
As they are, regrettably, such malleable, lightweight notions,
Not given to steadfastness or certainty of action
The upshot of which sadly proved beyond my ken,
A final, fatal blunder, a failing to sufficiently consider
That man lacks the stability of the simple hyacinth
And what he has created, God shall put asunder.

It is an undertaking to be done with some trepidation,
As the arrival of June-like warmth and sunshine
Can lead us to an unwise giddiness,
A disregard for what we instinctually know
Concerning the introduction of basil and succulents
While the spectre of an unwelcome late-season freeze
Lurks some days westward in Calgary or Winnipeg,
But this is mostly the grunt work
One puts in for preparation for summer's bounty,
The shoveling and hoeing and grunting
Which one performs with pro forma grunting and *******
There is a certain reflexive restoration in this task
Which belies our outward irritation
And though we cast the odd sideways glance
Toward the shadows at the back of the lot
Where rabbits and chipmunks
And other less tangible potential enemies lie in wait
There is a warmth which permeates marrow and memory,
A thing which recalls a child running
Through torrents of October leaves
Or sitting wordlessly with a loved one on the porch
Or any number of tableaus from this thing
Of worry and wonder.

It was a trip which was essential, one supposes,
Though the notion that one must parse
Which forays into the outdoors
Require self-justification
(If we are short on milk, can one linger on
To peruse beer or chips, or gaze longingly
At the ground beef and chicken *******
Priced into the lofty realm of the luxury item?)
In the midst of this reverie upon the new regimen,,
I turned onto a side street, where I happened to see
A young girl dipping a small wand
Into a non-descript bottle,
And as the implement came forth,
Great globular soap bubbles appeared
Huge unrestrained things,
Floating onward and upward without care nor constriction,
And though the child was suitably masked,
It took no more than the quickest glance into her eyes
To know her smile was every bit as beatific
As any enjoyed by our mothers or grandmothers
Or any such progeny as may come to be
In what one hopes will be better times.

It stood on a mound, prepossessing in its own right,
But the height of the grim, unadorned steeple
And the tableau it cast when storms would roll in
From the cold gray waters of Lake Erie
Was somewhat intimidating to small children
And others predisposed to being dominated,
Though what awaited one within
Could be equally intimidating, if no more so;
Oh, there was the nod to brotherly love
And coming to God with a joyful noise,
But the occupants of the pulpit
(Invariably square-jawed, gray-maned older men
Whose visages were brewing maelstroms,
Incipient cloudbursts on the very precipice
Of drenching the insufficiently pious)
Left no doubt as to the serious of their mission,
And were equally up front as to the cataclysm
Which would rain down on the congregation,
The mills, the town and all those
Who proved insufficient in their piety,
And while there were questions
Concerning prescience and cause-and-effect,
Most of what they threatened came to be
(The Montmorenci Company shuttered and silent,
A sad procession of U-Hauls, all on one-way rentals
Tottering out of town after the muted goodbyes)
Though, as an unintended and unforeseen consequence,
Taking the church as well, its grounds now only visited
By mothers and small children
Clambering upon the playground equipment
The church begrudgingly installed
Shortly before it closed its doors for good,
And when the gunboat-gray clouds
Rolled on down from up near Buffalo,
They would hurry on home
As the droplets, relative leviathans
Slapping on the pavement as they scurried home,
Came at increasingly frequent intervals,
And though they could hear the rumbles of thunder
Grumbling with a certain portent as the storm moved closer,
Their procession, though quite brisk,
Was more unless unworried,
The adults knowing full well the downpours
Were merely succor upon the carrots and gardenias.

In his reveries, there is no furtive glancing around corners,
No skulking and scraping to hide from scowling gendarmes.
He is huge, *******, a proto-Kong of the wrong side of the tracks,
(Indeed, more than that—beyond the corporeal,
Something elemental, Master of Nature’s laws
Yet subservient to none of them)
Strutting down the boulevards and byways,
Marching through the very midst of graveside services,
Feasting on the floral tributes,
Fornicating with the freshly dug earth.
And he races onward, unconstrained and uncontrollable,
Forcing himself upon matchstick girl and street urchin,
Misusing them in horrible, unspeakable ways,
(His appetites creatures unto themselves,
Not subject by the boundaries of propriety or biology)
Taking for himself their sad collections of pennies,
Tossing them heavenward to rain down in a copper cacophony
Before he steals upon an unsuspecting bobby,
Slitting his throat and setting the corpse afire,
Proceeding then to urinate upon the ashes.
As these tableaus unfold in the nickelodeon of his sleep
(Not accompanied by some tinkling version of Hurry No. 26
Jangling uncertainly on some hayseed the-ay-ter untuned upright
But rather by some Dada-esque concoction
Bereft of consistent key or time signature)
He laughs unrestrainedly, bereft of cause or context
Without a trace of mirth or simple humanity.

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.

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.

He’d never met the old man, of course,
As he’d put haylofts and horseshit behind him
Faster than a body could say “Jack Robinson”,
Though he’d met the son when he’d come through
For a quick hello-and-how’m-I-doing back in sixty-five or sixty-six
(I’d asked him, he’d often say while sharing a laugh with himself,
If the ‘A’ in Nelson A. stood for ’A ******* heap of money.')
No one from that branch of the family comes around anymore,
(It being unlikely they could find the place on a map,
Even one of the few which nodded toward its existence)
Having long since given up on the land in general
And, most certainly, this piece in particular,
Though he carriers the banner for the patronymic
In the ancestral family environs
(The surname, once universally known and,
Depending on one’s outlook,
Revered or reviled, now an anachronistic footnote,
Consigned to a black-and-white era
Like so many I Love Lucy re-runs)
Living in the front rooms of what passes for a house on Bowery Lane,
And he will, all too close to invariably for those old-timers
Who gather at the compact little diner at the four corners
(Its life blood dependent on parents dropping off their progeny
At the tony schools over in Ithaca, the regulars passing the time
In mock argument over which one of them
Actually owns the BMW with Connecticut plates)
All but cackle Boys, I’d gladly pick up the tab today,
But the lawyers are still hagglin’ over my part of the inheritance,
And once he has finished the final refill of coffee,
He slowly negotiates his way out of his chair and heads out,
The gravelly shoulder of the highway all too noticeable
Through the thinning soles of his secondhand boots.

He'd actually made it up into the tree stand
Two, maybe three years ago now
(Though finding the **** thing
Had been an adventure its ownself,
Finally seeing a bit of chair
Poking through a barricade of lounge chairs and potting soil)
Though not without more than a bit of trepidation and profanity,
(The climber stand heavier and bulkier than he remembered,
His hips and left knee as little less dexterous)
Eventually settling himself into the seat
To wait and ponder and try to balance the coffee intake
To stay in the interval between enough to warm
But not enough to have to **** like a **** racehorse.
He wasn't sure how much time had passed
When the buck came:  six points, and he reckoned
It would dress out close to two hundred pounds
And slowly, cautiously he sighted him
(It was at least a fair look--a shade inside ninety yards,
But some brush and branches keeping it
From being a clean **** shot)
Exhaling and stilling himself
But, inexplicably he would often tell himself later,
He did not fire, and perhaps it was because
He'd have to aim high due to the branches,
And he didn't want to risk simply winging him
Or, even worse, hitting him just solid enough
That he'd wander deeper into the woods to die
(Tracking him not something beyond his experience,
But an unwanted test of other faculties)
And maybe it was something else altogether,
But he'd pulled back and dropped the barrel.
Well son, he mused to himself
Looks like you drew a lucky ticket today.
He stayed in the tree for a little while longer
Until the coffee, long since past any pretense of warmth,
Gave out, and then he clambered down
(The process not any easier and that direction, he'd reckoned)
Hauling himself and acoutrements back to the truck,
The stand carefully placed back where he'd found it,
And as he headed back to the house
He hummed some indeterminate, vaguely hymnal tune
In testimony to the vagaries of time and venison jerky.

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.

Such were evenings of the type too often marked as sultry,
But sometimes such descriptions are apt
And thus denoted as so;
We would be well into the bottles and cans
To such point as we were not wearing them particularly well,
And so we spoke of things
Which may or may not have mattered,
The relative merits of cinema femme fatales
Dead four, perhaps five decades,
The notion of such women who had it,
(Followed by the de rigeur toasts to Chrissy Hynde,
And long may she wail)
Various things which disappeared with the fog and dew
Once sunrise made its unhappy presence known,
And when the old boiler suggested that sleep and abstinence
Constituted the prudent route to follow,
I excused myself for a walk,
(Nodding to my brother-in-law as he nodded,
Possibly but not invariably still awake)
Undertaken in various shambling states of unsteadiness
Back to my mother-in-law's house
Muttering silent regrets for the lack of bread crumbs
Mixed with somewhat less than sotto voce snippets
Of songs sung earlier with considerable gusto
And nearly adequate fidelity to sharps and flats,
And if I had maintained a relative judiciousness in my intake
(The alternative an unpleasant return to my domicile pro tem,
Usually marked with an entrance featuring mud and mayhem,
More or less forgiven the next morning)
I would, if the evening was clear and still,
Speculate upon the nature of the starlight,
Be it the distress calls of celestial bodies dark and listless
Or something in its salad days, so to speak,
And often it would strike me as somewhat less than fitting
That not a single glass had been raised to their health.

(for Thom Hickey)

It is, one supposes, a business establishment, if just barely
Though more than one would-be shopper,
Having been squeezed against some ancient china cabinet
Or banging an unsuspecting knee
Against some camouflaged table leg,
Has opined that it as if four walls and a low-slung ceiling
Had suddenly thrown themselves about a yard sale,
In any case the place being filled with such things
Which are, if by no means useless bric-a-brac,
Rendered unremarkable, even somewhat undesirable
By their very familiarity,
And in the midst of this rabbit warren of commerce
(Holding an ancient clarinet in his left hand,
Wand-like, a bemused Prospero considering its pros and cons)
Is the proprietor of the shop,
And he notes that you have stopped
In front of some sixties flying-saucer-***-willow-tree lamp,
And he says Ah, well let me tell you something about that,
Holding forth on its manufacturer,
The curious backstory of its design,
And how he came in possession of several other pieces
At the same time, and of course they have their own tales as well,
And you can't help how this confusion of things of former lives
Has suddenly taken on a certain light, a glow even,
The illumination of shared memory,
The recollection of why such things hold a place
In our pasts and presents, and after you exit
You give in to the musing that there were some items
You did not give due consideration,
Which may necessitate a return trip.