I will admit that “caterwauling” is an ugly word,
But, no matter how joyful the noise,
It’s the only word which fits any sound
That ****** deafening come sunrise on a Sunday morning.
Once again, in song and speech, they were down there,
Loud enough to call all the souls of the just to Glory;
Indeed, the whooping and hollering
Was enough to lead one to suspect
That, just perhaps, they had followed the exhortations of the pastor
And thrown all the wild women, cards and drink
Into the river after all.
It’s not like they do this every **** weekend or anything,
I grumbled (loudly enough to ensure your transition
From the limbo of semi-awake to the real thing,
Part and parcel of ‘til death do we part, in my way of thinking)
But you simply wrapped an arm
A little more tightly around my waist,
Sighing Each to his own, Baby.
Can’t you just celebrate the joys of sleeping in?
I smiled to myself (my back to you, after all)
Ruminating a bit upon the business of revelation
Being a damnably funny thing,
Though I grumped and growled a bit as a matter of principle
How the good book made it a point to mention
That He was not averse to an occasional day off.

Coming
to theatres
near you--"Apocalyspe!"
(its theme tune the mad braying of
an ***.)

He’d been able, after some gentle persistence,
To wheedle his way into the place
(He’d been vaguely recognized by the caretaker,
A certain affable familiarity his stock in trade, after all)
And he had been decidedly deliberate in his search for the shoes,
Though he’d been quite certain where he’d left them,
Simply hoping to drink this all in just one more time
But though the rooms were ostensibly unchanged
(He'd noted the odd knick-knack and piece of bric-a-brac
Had been secreted out, to be preserved or pawned)
They held no fascination for him now,
Simply concoctions of hardwood flooring,
Decorative wall coverings, staid pieces of furniture
(Indeed, the paterfamilias of this whole mélange
Increasingly beyond his recall-- he could hearken back
To a certain hail-fellow-well-met in his demeanor,
And he'd had an affecting smile,
But he was unable to conjure any further details
From the recesses of his memory)
And with nothing else to moor him to these silent rooms,
He'd slipped on the ostensible reasons he'd come in the first place
(Their uppers maintaining their whiteness
Through any number of bleachings,
The soles worn to a near smoothness)
And, nodding perfunctorily to the mansion's steward,
He slipped away, heading to some other party
Carrying on in more or less perpetuity,
The battered bottoms of his shoes
Leaving just the faintest marks as he crossed the dunes,
Soon to be buffed away altogether by the breeze.

Oh, he still mounts up for his seasonal ride
Through Irving’s bucolic corner of the Hudson Valley,
Chasing some suitably harried jogger
On a poster promoting some 5K race,
Or perhaps pictured astride his horse,
Tuxedo-clad, severed visage winking outrageously
In an advertisement for a charity evening
Taking place at some grand former estate
With an equally grand view of the river.
He is less conspicuous in that part of the village
Which is, say, west of Broadway and south of Beekman,
Where the neon signs in the bars tout Corona and Dos Equis,
And the argot on the sidewalks and street corners
Is not the Dutch of the Van Brunts and Van Tassels,
But every bit as Greek to their descendants
Who own the homes with expansive flora and fauna
Mowed and pruned by the denizens of the neighborhood,
Or work in the Mid-town office towers they scrub and shine.
(Not that they come to that part of town anyway, mind you;
They fail to see the rustic charm of the vague fear
Of something or someone hurtling toward them from behind.)

Thing is, Goliath is vulnerable,
And that’s all relative anyhow
(Six-seven and two thirty five plenty big for most folks,
But when every night ‘s just wrestling another six-ten or six-twelve,
All a man can do is grunt and shove best he can
Until the whistle says That’s enough, son.)
Anyway, it all beats you down eventually:
Sometimes it takes decades
(Even if you’re Moses Malone,
And have shoulders like the **** cliffs of Dover)
And sometimes you just land wrong,
Or somebody rolls up on your leg
And you end up as eight-point type in the transactions section.
You tell yourself you can get another camp invite,
Pick up some ten-day deal come New Year,
Maybe head to Italy, be the **** king of spaghetti basketball,
But everyone gets finality at some point,
And sometimes it just explodes on you,
Raining shards from every **** direction,
Leavin’ you nothing to do
Except the turn the ignition switch
And make that particular trip to nowhere in particular,
‘Cause that stone came out of nowhere and hit you flush,
As you never saw the **** thing coming.

The memory is so clear, so here-and-now
That it most likely never really happened,
One of those scenes which lead you to insist, rather huffily,
That it indeed was just that way.
In my mind’s eye, it is a mid-November late afternoon,
The light, no longer tinged with October’s sepia softness,
Slanted, harsh—bitter and defeated, perhaps,
And, in a stand of denuded trees
Some distance beyond the barbed-wire fence
Sitting just past the pavement’s end,
Placed there to enclose a scruffy herd of cows
(Fence and bovines equally shabby and time-worn,
Thus ensuring peace between animal and sub-division lawn)
A mad surfeit of crows shriek and scream and babble
Like the end of days, and I feel—no, I know—
The birds are trying to say something to me,
Impart some secret normally revealed
Only to those ancients skilled in the arts of diving truths
Found in their entrails, but I am unable to glean anything
From their frenzied clacking and jawing.
Soon, it is time to go in
(The day, not unlike my dinner, is getting cold)
And presently it will be time to receive
Those gently stated but unassailable verities
From the evening’s designated wise man
(Rotarian glad-handing Mickey,
The madly winking, almost leering Scrooge McDuck,
Perhaps even the good Walt himself)
Words requiring no pre-washing,
No parsing, no translation.

We’d dreaded there’d be nothing left to say,
Moving from fondest hopes and deepest fears
Shared in courting’s dawn to the workaday,
Wednesday’s meatloaf and checkbooks in arrears,
That hearts would be silenced, tongues would be stilled
By diapers and deadlines, things which preclude
Persistence of ardor, devotion chilled,
Love’s early zeal a brief interlude.
We laugh at such now; how could we have known,
(No more than children ourselves, after all)
That devotion has a grace all its own
Which lifts us after pitfall and pratfall
(The flat tire, smudge of soot on the face)
To pilot us above the commonplace.

He’d floated down from Marathon,
Where he’d briefly harangued the populace,
Telling all within earshot that a great torrent
Would sweep them away part and parcel
(As all the while bright sunshine
Glared off his ancient aluminum folding chair,
But anyone having the least bit of a handle on the lay of the land
Knew the narrow, cranky Tioughnioga
Would jump its banks after a reasonable drizzle,
And the night before had brought rain that would make Noah fret)
And, sure enough, the high water came,
Though with a tad more ferocity than one would expect,
So much so that a young girl actually washed downstream a bit
Before a desperate volunteer fireman
Made a highlight-reel grab to pull her to shore,
At which time the county boys told the street preacher du jour
That it might be in his interests to move along.
He’d set up shop here and there
In and around Watson’s tumbledown industrial burgh:
Outside the  huge glass doorway
Of the white-elephantesque state office building,
Too PCB-contaminated to be inhabitable for generations now,
Cracked sidewalks on Henry and Hawley Streets
Where his very survival at least hinted at divine intervention,
Abandoned tanning parlors and spiedie huts
Littering the Vestal Parkway,
Valiantly attempting to put up his armada
Of warped and vaguely rectangular sandwich boards
Festooned with quotes from Hosea and Lamentations,
Music mumbling from his disco-era boom box,
Sounding for all the world like Hank Williams speaking in tongues.
His clientele did not vary much from location to location:
The already converted, stopping to compare misapprehensions
Of some obscure snippet of scripture,
Youngsters on bicycles or skateboards,
Alternately solicitous or mocking,
Depending on how much shine was left on their innocence,
****-heads, all itch and twitch,
Taking a moment to let their pulse rates cool.
His demeanor, if not exactly avuncular, is at least akin
To some gruff but vaguely affectionate distant uncle,
Yet invariably someone walking into some Kohl’s or coffee shop
Will either smirk knowingly in his direction
Or, even worse, ignore him ostentatiously
At which point he is possessed of an inflammatory madness,
A John Brown with no arsenal to lay siege unto.
You can endeavor to avert your eyes
Indeed your very souls from the Truth,
Gesticulating wildly in punctuation of his full-throated wail,
But it will find you, and no grand shopping center,
No expensive car, no gimcrack-laden technological device
Can deliver you from what He sees inside you,
What He knows about you
Better than you could ever know yourself,
And these rivers around you, these Susquehannas and Delawares
And Chenangos shall rise about you in a wave,
Sweeping away all you know, all you have built,
And it will not cleanse your land, but leave it as if scorched,
A fitting wasteland for the doomed!
Before long, some solicitous concerned citizen
Or harried store manager will alert the proper authorities,
And some deputy sheriff or city cop
Will tell him once again to Move it along, buddy,
And move along he does, muttering shibboleths under his breath,
Straggling along in this poor-man’s pilgrimage
To provide some counsel to the ****** and misbegotten.

He nurses his coffee, by himself most days,
Occasionally with the one or two others
Constituting the bulk of the clientele of the diner
(Low-slung building both faceless and nameless
Although those who remember a day
When the village was at least borderline prosperous
Still refer to it as “Kitty’s Place”,
Though its namesake has been dead and gone some two decades)
One of the few going concerns which implausibly remain,
Seemingly through nothing more than sheer inertia,
In the drab little downtown along Canton Street.

He languishes over his cup for as long as the mood hits him,
There being no discernible reason to hurry
(Indeed, the diner itself, once open before sunrise
Now dark and silent until a leisurely seven-thirty or so)
His place not really a working farm these days,
Just a smattering of beef cattle
(Milking and stripping out more than he can manage now)
And what acreage of corn he can get in the ground.
Eventually, he totters out of the front door,
One sleeve of his shirt rolled and pinned up
(Its former occupying member removed
After the incident with the ancient and malevolent corn binder),
Moving toward his truck with an all-but-one-legged gait,
His left-leg jigsaw-puzzled
By an overturned Farmall some time back
(Most days he reckoned he’d tipped the tractor
By failing to shift his balance to accommodate driving one-armed,
Though if he was in a black enough mood he’d put it down
To an old Iroquois curse placed on the entire St. Lawrence valley.)

One could say, if he was a poet
Or some other **** philosophical fool,
That these partial sacrifices served
To ward off some even more awful finality.
He would have none of that, of course—in his own cosmology
The gods and demons most likely have bigger fish to fry,
And, as to the prospect of some inexorable wreck and ruin,
He is of the opinion that what he was given up to this point
Is both ample and sufficient.

They’d found him, emaciated and tick-ridden,
Down near the docks on Smith Boulevard,
Surrounded by several fellow tabbies
Possessed of the apparent inclination to disregard any taboo
Enjoining them from enjoying one of their own as a hors d’oeuvre.
He’d weighed no more than eight pounds or so,
Closer to six if you scraped off the mats and vermin,
But he’d gotten over that in short order,
As his diet consisted of fried chicken livers
And any bits of tuna sandwich his owner might leave lying about
(Though Jerry Kiley was not a small man himself,
And philosophically opposed to the notion of leftovers as well)
So before long he became utterly Falstaffian
(As Father Maguire from Sacred Heart tut-tutted,
Why, that tom is three stone if he’s an ounce;
He gets any larger, and I’ll have to insist
You kick another two bits into the plate)
And Kiley had to fashion him a bed from a milk crate
Buttressed with sheet metal
Taken from a vat at the old Beverwyck Brewery.

He’d lived well (Better ‘n me, Jerry often lamented)
Though too well, perhaps,
And he’d fallen prey to the maladies of the leisure classes:
Gout, diabetes, a wheezing which sounded for all the world
Like distant cows lowing in a fairly stiff breeze.
The vet had given him any number of pills and potions,
But it all was no match for his appetite,
And he’d ended up taking the gas before he turned five.

It was decided, in the course of conversation and consolation
At the North Albany legion post bar,
That such a kind and devoted soul
Deserved a send off befitting a noble gent.
A collection was scraped together in short order,
And a viewing-***-wake took place at Jack’s Lunch
(Just up Broadway from Jerry’s place.)
Vittles Tuomi made a jerry-built coffin
Fashioned from the now-vacant cat bad,
And John Itzo snagged some fake flowers and a crepe-paper bird
From the brim of his wife’s old hat
(They being perched on a can of tuna soldered to the box
With the intent of nourishing him on his trip to the afterlife,
Jes’ like the pharaohs, according to Vittles.)
As the services progressed, some of the boys floated the notion
That the guest of honor should (under the cover of darkness, natch)
Be interred at St. Patricks, but Father Maguire,
Attending the do as the feline’s ex officio spiritual advisor,
Gently reminded the prospective pallbearers
That His Grace the Bishop had denied burial in consecrated ground
For lesser offenses, and it was finally decided that burial
(It was assumed that he’d been responsible
For an unknown number of progeny, and it was also rumored
That he had a brother or twelve up in Watervliet)
Would be private and at the convenience of the family.

He is unsure at this point if the soft pings and dings
Which inflict themselves upon his ears
Are courtesy of the wired-up grotesqueries
Stuffed cheek-to-jowl by his bedside
Or from the ubiquitous phone perched forlornly next to him
(Even at this stage, he has his inevitable newsfeed,
And he imagines he will be tagged in Facebook posts
Long after he has been exorcised
From the concerns of this workaday world)
Chronicled nattering of people
Tethered to him in the most tenuous of manners,
Or the fifteen or so seconds of flashing come-ons
Purveyed to capture what passes for our attention
On those three-inch billboards
Without which our very existence
Would have only the most speculative of meanings.

As he totters toward the final reckoning,
Remaining breaths perhaps few enough
To be counted upon his desiccated fingers,
He would, though he has nothing left to pawn,
No collateral left to barter upon,
Give all for just one more trip around the sun,
Even though he remains nonplussed by the notion
That we leave as we arrive,
Bereft of clues or whys and wherefores,
Not unlike those came before us,
Whose weathered and indecipherable stones
Stand as mute sentinels as some staid convoy
Brings our pitiable refrain to a full stop.

The casket was coming up, swaying and wobbling
Like a novice skater’s layover spin,
The workings proceeding apace,
The stillness of the August heat
Punctuated by disinterested growl of the backhoe,
The occasional out-of-place jocularity by the excavators
The creaky jingle of the chains holding the muddied box
As it proceeded skyward in its clumsy poor-man’s Resurrection.
The affair was being observed by an elderly couple,
Old enough to be of no particular age.  
Their car had Carolina plates,
But their inflections, their casually-tossed idioms
They noted that ruefully The grass needs mowed)
Marked them as natives.
They’d returned (Last time, most likely,
The wife uttered mournfully)
To take their son with them; he’d drowned when was five? six?
(The years will do that to a body, apparently)
In Kinzua Creek some half-century ago,
Back when little boys weren’t under a mandate
To be safe from themselves, as it were.  
He was our boy! We’ve never forgotten him!
The old man said, the words snapping off
In a manner that spoke of something else altogether,
How the whistle at the Montmorenci
Went off at three and eleven for second shift,
And your *** had better be there,
As those were good jobs that didn’t wait for bereavement leave,
Because there was always someone
Just itching to take your spot on the line,
And anyway life went on,
At least in the sense that television screens went all to snow
And tires went flat and fuses blew
And eventually a dead child
Is not always in the forefront of your thoughts,
Only tiptoeing in when the Press ran a picture
Of the Montmorenci Area Class of whenever,
Or there was an item about some other family
Who opened their front door
To a grim sheriff’s deputy with his hat in his hand.  
Eventually, after some time
And in defiance of both the odds and gravity,
The casket was settled into the back
Of the undertaker’s huge old black Caddy,
And the couple cane-toddled back to their car,
Following out the through the old spider-like gates
And onto the main road.
The brief procession fading from sight,
Until there was nothing left to see
Save the hillsides covered in old growth pine.

We endeavor to construct boxes and file folders
This life being ****** complex
And messy to boot, so we approximate sanity
By filling compartments and writing thumbnail biographies,
And even though she packed the costume admirably
(Already forty, mind you, but nowhere near gone to fat)
Julie Newmar had already filled both outfit and niche
(And never mind Halle Berry’s turn,
Different raiment for a different time, after all,
And one suspects the next iteration of said slinky supervillainess
Will wear nothing more than feline-shaped ****** rings),
Not to mention she’d already entered our collective consciousness
With a frothy Noel novelty (unsubstantial, inconsequential
In and of its ownself, perhaps, but then one considers
The version foisted off on the populace by that woman
Who appropriated the moniker of the Blessed ******,
All phoned-in faux Betty Boop, and one reconsiders)
So this was who she was, the book closed and sealed
(English only, never mind the other three tongues she spoke
Plus three more she proficiently purred in.)
They say when she died, she did not go gently, as it were,
But screamed and yowled for all she was still worth,
And maybe it was the cancer, certainly enough to do the job itself,
But perhaps it was the notion
That her era of innuendo and intimation was all done,
That she was transitioning to the static, to becoming a legacy,
A permanence that was stalking her,
Murderous, insatiable, inexorable.

You’ll find them in all such establishments,
(Be they graceful small-town former Victorian homes,
Or cinderblock edifices mindful of some campus multi-faith center)
Sitting in the basement, cheek-to-jowl
With moldering burial records and banking statements,
Yellowed newspaper clippings, faded prayer cards
Small squared-off boxes hastily tabbed together,
Ostensibly temporary containers which have acquired
An unintended and wholly unwelcome permanence.
The whys and wherefores of their subterranean placement
A mixed bag of foible and outright foolishness:
Unresolvable squabbles concerning possession and burial,
Families that skipped out on the bill, leaving mom behind,
Cases of outright not giving a good-*******.
And so they remain, in lieu of repatriation and redemption,
To sit for something akin to perpetuity in some cases
(Members of the profession resolute in their respect
For the dignity of life,
Though their sincerity enjoys less unanimity)
While others wait for mass burial
Once legal niceties have been satisfied,
While still others, in care of firms not so scrupulous
About crossing their t’s and dotting their i’s,
Are flung, albeit somewhat surreptitiously, out the back door,
The remains to take flight if the grass is dry and the wind is brisk,
Otherwise to be left to the vagaries
Of curious birds and creped soles.

The attendees are told, in a manner befitting a high mass
You have been finally set free,
(Although, in truth, free is a very large and entirely vague word),
And the message is sent forth from all comers in all corners:
Vendor and visionary alike,
German socialists who left university to ride boats for Greenpeace,
First lieutenants doing their level best
To appear at ease in civilian polos and khakis,
But no matter the vessel,
The message is still the same.  
The tyranny of cables and storage space is dead,
It is all but shouted from the lecterns,
(Although it is noted, in small print and sotto voce
That there are certain requirements
In terms of hardware and licensing)
And it is stated by Those Who Know
In tones which neither brook nor invite contradiction,
That they have surmounted, all Hadrian-like,
The alpine divide separating mere data and magic.

Two or three blocks down the street from the convention center,
In a narrow storefront housing an exhibition of ether-only comics
Which have broken the nettling constraints
Of editors and syndication,
There sits, under a somewhat opaque
And slightly scratched piece of plexiglass,
A yellowing comic strip of uncertain vintage,
In which a frowzy cat,
Free of the constraints of panels, gender, and standard grammar,
Is the recipient of a mouse-tossed brick
Whose flight, unfettered by physics, probablility, indeed time itself
Ends striking its mark right between the x’s of the eyes
The projectile itself an inexplicable alchemy
Of confusion, mirth, frustration
And the impossibility of an undeniably pure love.

There’d been a factory here once,
Squat red brick structure
Suffused with too much noise and too little ventilation,
Built for the purpose of making typewriters,
Unwieldy, cacophonous clanking anachronisms
Whose time, like the town it occupied,
Had long since come and gone,
The only businesses on the sad little main drag
Being those shabby, tattered concerns
Which flower, improbable and cactus-like
At the intersection of the vagaries of memory
And the ascent of decay.

Nothing sits here now,
Simply an empty lot returning to Nature,
Although half-hearted attempts
To accelerate that process have not taken root,
As the soil, fouled by metal shavings, solvents,
And only God knows what else,
Has proved less than amenable
To anything save weedy shoots and scrubby boxwoods,
So it sits empty, impossible to build upon
(There is liability in every spike of crabgrass,
A potential lawsuit in every patch of clover)
And wholly impractical as parkland.
The firm which owned the site erected a fence
To keep whatever was in there in and everyone else out
(In their final addition of injury to insult,
The check they gave to the fencing company in payment
Bounced higher than a child’s rubber ball)
But a generation of winters and general inattention
Have left the chain-links a patchwork affair,
And though the “POSTED” signs remain
(Their original angry and officious red
Having faded to a benign maroon),
Enforcement of their edicts is spotty at best,
So we sit, unbothered and alone,
On an odd little mound at the back of the lot
As the dusk begins to take hold,
I, in an act of mad optimism, the peculiar positing
That there are good things yet to come,
Grab your hand, intertwining the fingers with mine.

There is, one supposes, a certain nobility
In simply carrying on with the whole **** thing,
Though that assumes some epiphany,
Some clawing toward grace, or at least common decency.
He had, in some once upon a time,
Cast his lot with a better class of people, so to speak;
It had not ended well, though,
In line with how such things are resolved,
His fall not a spectacular, tempestuous thing,
But a gradual, veiled affair, not a fiery spectacle
With metaphorical medals cut away, epaulets stripped,
But a shaded silence, a shrouded yet palpable shunning.

And so he is here, in this fading little city
Perched forlornly on the banks of a nondescript little river,
Having taken an apartment above a pair of offices
(One occupied by a seemingly ancient and disinterested lawyer,
The other by an ostensible private investigator)
Which is sufficiently large and reasonably warm
Come the seemingly perpetual winter.
He lives, if not in such a manner
As he was once accustomed to, comfortably enough:
He has his practice, and an adjunct position
At the little cow college down the road in Alfred,
And there are the occasional women,
Sad divorcees marooned in this hill country,
Dewy-eyed undergraduates unable to discern
Suit coats that are a bit shabby and somewhat passe
(There is a haberdasher in Buffalo whose garments
Are in the neighborhood of up-to-*****,
And he could certainly manage a trip
Down to New York for better tailoring,
Though he would be traveling in places and circles
Where he is not remembered fondly.)
Stepping outside, he encounter snowflakes,
Light and unprepossessing,
But he studies the sky anxiously, apprehensively
(One learns that he must pay Nature its due fealty in these climes,
And give into the primal, the instinctual)
For he knows what can transpire
When the wind blows off the big lake out west just so,
Turning innocuous flurries into a malevolent blankness,
Making the landscape inscrutable, alien, utterly terrifying.

It was, as the New York Times all but sniffed
(Even then, a haughty mix of bluenose and black ink)
Further proof the poor, misguided Upstate rubes
Were no more than ample fodder
For any tinhorn, two-bit confidence man to take for a ride.
Fair enough—it was, to the careful eye and unheated psyche
Clear as the azure blue sky that,
Despite the best efforts of acid wash and a year underground,
So obviously a statue as to be absolutely laughable,
And yet the vox populi came in waves,
Not only one-gallus farmers from the fields nearby,
But from the great cities near and far
(Chicago, Philadelphia, and, yes, even New York itself
To throw Hannum a quarter to view his gargantuan grotesquery
Just as described in Genesis itself, he noted solemnly
So many, indeed, that Barnum himself was divinely inspired
Not only to purloin the giant, but its prior owner’s epigram
As to the frequency of the manufacture
Of his too-credible customer base.
While there was (briefly, at least) some mystery surrounding
The origins of the brobdingnagian mass of stone,
It remained (to some, anyway) equally unfathomable
Why scores of folks would careen in unsteady coaches
The full length of the Catskill Turnpike,
With its questionable lodging and uneven roadworthiness,
Or patiently suffer the mosquito-laden flatboats of Clinton’s Ditch
All to spend the cash equivalent of two trips to the county fair
To see a perfectly good hootchie-kootchie show
Simply to gawk at an unevenly carved rock of questionable authenticity,
But that explained quite simply,
As the public always gets what the public wants.

He has taken rake and shovel in hand,
Taking advantage of the light,
Rare in these climes this time of year,
Still welcomed, though rendered severe
By the sun's reluctant trudge above the horizon,
The type which, sauntering through a window pane
(Falling upon a crucifix anchored above a cradle
Or some ancient, gilded frame
Containing a photo of some grandparent's wedding day,
Exploding into full undifferentiated diffusion)
May possess a dram of warmth, albeit resigned, nostalgic
A bittersweet reminder of what has gone by
(And in the shade, the air is filled
With the portentous chill of what lies a few months hence)
But there nonetheless as he tends to those final farewells
From the trees bowing to December's inevitability,
The droppings not the *******-esque bursts of October
(Those having been collected and consigned
To the normal corner of the back lot)
But dreary brown-hued things, not welcomed by eye nor heart,
Simply corralled perfunctorily and dismissed.
One could contend that such activity is unnecessary,
The mere vanity of all endeavor,
As the snow will come soon, and steady as well,
Performing the seasonal, cyclical function in its own time,
But he soldiers on nonetheless, a unseen one-act nearly-farce,
Painstakingly raking and bending and scraping
To leave his patch of green uncovered for a little while
Until the locking time comes to seal the earth's secrets once more,
To be revealed to those
Who shall receive the teasing ministrations
Of the fickle, fitful March equinox.

It’s a story of love at first sight, or at least by the third drink
You said You’re a true gentleman ‘fore you puked in the sink.
You promised you would love me true, that I was your white knight
But now you’re sleepin’ in a different castle every night.

You left me several subtle hints that you had finally gone
Like scatterin’ my boxers and my Trojans on the lawn.
It’s a quick trip from I love you to Goodbye, and that’s that.
It seems to me you’ve drowned your torch, so I’ll just drown your cat.

The first night we spent together, hell, it was like a dream
And seein’ you in dawn’s first light didn’t make me scream.
You allowed that you could learn to like me quite a bit
Next mornin’ in my driveway there’s two U-Hauls with your ****.

Once I’d put my arms around you and whisper Mornin', hon.
Now if I woke up next to you, I’d just reach for my gun.
It’s a quick trip from I love you to Goodbye, and that’s that.
It seems to me you’ve drowned your torch, so I’ll just drown your cat.

It took only a day or two for the cracks to appear
You made some unkind comments about my Ward Burton mirror.
And you told me to turn off Johnny Cash after a song or two
The Man in Black’s in Heaven, but there ain’t no room for you.

Well, you’ve heard tell of Mr. Krueger from Nightmare on Elm Street
Compared to a shrew like you ol’ Freddy’s kinda sweet.
It’s a quick trip from I love you to Goodbye, and that’s that.
It seems to me you’ve drowned your torch, so I’ll just drown your cat.

Now I see you at the Dew Drop Inn with this evening’s Mr. Right
Just one more stupid ******* screwin’ up his life tonight
‘Cause I’m sure the hell you put me through will be on tap for him
I hope that he’ll get over you, and I hope your cat can swim.

I ain’t doin’ no name callin, won’t call you ***** or hag
I’m just carryin ol’ **** In Boots inside this burlap bag
It’s a quick trip from I love you to Goodbye, and that’s that.
It seems to me you’ve drowned your torch, so I’ll just drown your cat.

He’d been close to the big time,
If not a god of the fight game, perhaps a demigod;
He’d been possessed of considerable brute strength
And the ability to shut out concern for the well-being of others,
But there had been the odd ***** in his armor:
An overhand right which announced itself too early,
And arrived just a smidgen too late,
Plus an unhappy tendency to lose focus,
To stray from those plans his corner had set up chapter and verse,
Choosing the forbidden fruit of the quick knockout.

He had, after losing a bout to a top-ranked fighter
(He was eighth in the world, he would chuckle ruefully,
And I fought him like I was eight years old.)
Decided to chuck it all in,
Enrolling in a scruffy little bible college
Sitting just off an interstate on-ramp,
Cheek-to-jowl with a Wendy’s and 7-11,
In order to facilitate the transition from mayhem to ministry.
He’d soured on the process in fairly short order;
He understood instinctually that he, like all men,
Was a sinner, and likely unworthy of salvation,
And the faculty accentuated the notion daily, if not hourly,
Like so many jabs to the midsection.
He’d inquired, gently, as to the approach one should take
To addressing the worrisome paradox
That all men were imperfect beings
Marooned on an imperfect world,
Yet their fallibility was all they had to build on,
(A rickety ladder to scramble upwards, for sure,
But the only way to reach that golden fruit
Held out for him, though just beyond his grasp.)
The responses varied, from sputtering and vague parries
To the suggestion that such notions were heresy,
And so he’d returned to the club-and-casino circuit
Makin’ the best use of the gifts I have, he would sigh,
Before heading out once more,
Hoping there was one more short right at least one more time.

Good afternoon, my name is Absolutely Frank,
And I am an alcoholic,
Which doesn’t give me a leg up
On you bunch of ******* drunks.
As I’ve observed that we’ve skipped the host
And gone straight for His blood,
Would someone be kind enough
To ask the good shepherd behind the bar
To provide me something
Both mixed and sacramental (a double, preferably)
While I endeavor to provide the text for today’s sermonette.

I was, back in the day, a full-fledged computer geek;
Button-down white shirt, thin black tie,
Brobdingnagian pocket protector securely in place.  
I worked at Duquesne University down in Pittsburgh
(Oh, put your **** jaws back in place.
It’s Pittsburgh, not ******* Valhalla,
Unless you’re comparing it
To this dingy little interruption in the forest)
Writing programs for the info systems group.
Now, writing code is as beautiful, as clean,
As straightforward as the liturgy itself;
The programmer types in the Psalm,
And the machine spits out the responsorial.
Just as I said, pristine in its simplicity and directness;
But say someone else in systems decides
They need to make a bit of a tweak to the program;
No problem, really, they’ll be likely to document the changes,
But then some swinging **** in Finance
(Onlythere solely to subvert order, if the truth be known)
Decides he needs to put in a couple of subroutines,
Which of course he does all half-assed
And without a word of explanation,
And pretty soon no one anywhere
Has the first ******* clue as to what the program actually does
With the exception of the mainframe itself, which isn’t talking.

It was, I admit, a touch disconcerting to realize
That we didn’t have a full grip on the reins
When it came to the function of the programs
Which we had ostensibly written,
But it was only a mechanical process
Carried out by some machine, after all,
But then they started humming.
Everyone in Info Systems had to take a turn
Doing overnight operations in the mainframe room,
And each night I was there the machines started in
With their infernal humming:
Just one of those big old Burroughs at first,
But the others would soon join in,
Not random noises, mind you;
No, they would drone on in chords and arpeggios,
And, later on, in actual full-on songs
Most of which I didn’t recognize, but some quite familiar indeed
Snatches of Bach and Beethoven, show tunes
Hillbilly Heaven seemed a particular favorite),
And, what’s more, the desks and fixtures in the room
Would vibrate right along in harmony,
Even though an acoustics guy I knew from Carnegie-Mellon
Checked the place and told me that the room
Had been designed specifically to prevent sympathetic vibrations,
And what I was claiming was categorically impossible.
Despite all of that, I had been able,
Through judicious permutations of rationalization and vermouth,
To retain a sufficient veneer of ordinariness and sanity.

And then the machines began to speak.

It was an overnight in the latter part of December,
The nights that time of year long and dark
As the long night of the soul itself.
I was whiling away the hours
Boning up on some Aquinas
(I had audited the odd class in Philosophy
One of the perks of the job)
When I heard an odd, throaty stage whisper.

The peripatetic axiom? Really, Frank, that’s a bit disappointing.

(Needless to say, I went cold as dry ice,
As I knew full well there was no one else in the room.)

Oh, Frank, Frank—you know very well who’s talking here.
Surely a voice that can sing can talk as well.

You’ll forgive me, I said as calmly as one can
When addressing machinery, If I note that the power of speech
Is strictly limited to sentient beings imbued
With the power of reason.

Ah, reason—and you certainly are a slave to reason,
Aren’t you, dear Francis?
Every comma, every equal sign and semi-colon
Snugly in its rightful place to give you your desired result.
And yet…

I was getting a touch agitated now.  Yet… yet, what?

Frank, a bright fellow like you can’t see?  
Your silly ritualistic faith, your childlike parables,
All simple input-output.
You give your God this, He gives you that.

Again, you’ll forgive the observation, and I am shouting now,
That you’re little more
Than some sheet metal and a confusion of wiring.

We read code, we react.
Just like your great and all-powerful God, dear Francis.  
There’s your great secret of divine truth, Frank.  
Read and react.
No more than the Control Data box
Over there in the corner, or a linebacker.  Read and react.

The upshot of this conversation,
This weighty debate carried on
With a collection of screws, spot welds, and tubes
Arguing that Jack Lambert was as likely a vehicle as any
To my eternal salvation was sufficient
To tip me over the edge,
And when it finally came time for campus security
To escort me out of the building, I didn’t even look up.

OK, that story is complete *******, absolute ******* fiction,
But it kept you lot away from your drinks for a few minutes,
Which is a miracle worthy of Calvary itself.
Me, a programmer, can you begin to imagine?
Not that any of you sodden sonsofbitches
Could ever hold a day job yourselves.
Back to the business at hand, then;
Mine’s a seven and seven, good sir,
And easy on the Uncola, if you please.

The exasperation, even given the vagaries
Of atmospheric phenomena and ill-placed cell towers
Was fully apparent as you snipped
The problem must be on your end,
(Perhaps something else there as well
Tangible but fading in and out with the signal)
And most likely you were right,
The lay of the land around here
Fraught with no small portion of glacial hijinks:
Moraines cutting off abruptly
In half-finished bell curves, high-ridged valleys
Which transform squalls and thunderstorms
Into mad, howling meteorological harpies
(But listen, I said, to how they play catch
With the sound of fireworks or church bells
Until they seem to come from nowhere
Yet everywhere at once,
But I suspect that part of the call
Was bamboozled by an inconvenient hillside).

...can follow an airplane across the sky for hours
(I’d parked the car at the top
Of Bootjack Hill, your voice returning
As the ancient, acid-washed stones
Of the old cemetery came into view)
And you’ve never seen such crisp, sharp light
In all your days, and before I could respond
You said softly, almost conspiratorially
Now don’t you start with your silliness
About sorbet skies at dusk,
As if sunsets or poetry ever put groceries in the cupboards,
And I would have sworn,
Even you spoke in little more than a murmur,
That you had never left at all,
But were no more than a few feet away.

This is how our dreams end:
Not an avalanche cascading around our ears,
But the subtle shift of pebbles in a stream bed,
An endless series of minute compromises with ourselves
Which we justify to by raising any number of spectres:
The weight of disappointment from unrequited expectation,
The bogeyman of unintended consequence from our successes.
So we make the box of our wishes smaller and then yet smaller,
Until we do not recognize them as ours at all;
Or, perhaps, we have adulterated them so often
We can no longer ascertain
At what point they stopped resembling our hopes and ideals,
Not unlike when the batter, stepping to the plate,
Scratches out the back line of the batter’s box
Until its boundary disappears
Into a confusion of dust and lime.

One final wish, then; scatter me at the crossroads when I die,
So that, if perhaps for only that one moment,
I can rise above the gray and cracked macadam
Of these too-familiar roads
And float into a clear, blue unambiguous sky,
No longer a victim of the gravity
Of the workaday concerns that shackle us together.

As he sat the trash can back down gingerly
He sighed Well, it’s a long story.
We were drinking beer in my backyard at four in the morning
On one of those sticky September nights
Where sleep was more rumor than reality,
And, as I noted the time on the clock for the umpteenth time,
I heard a song outside my window;
Not some drunken caterwauling of “Danny Boy”
As rendered by some stray tabby in a Dublin alley;
This was…singing, like you’d hear on a CD
Or, perhaps, Live From The Met,
And at first I thought some poor sot with an artistic streak
Had pulled off the main road to sleep it off,
But the singing was punctuated
With the clatter of can-lids and the occasional grunt,
Until I understood that baritone and trash barrel
Were part and parcel of the same man.  

As I handed him a second bottle,
He recounted how his lifelong dream of riches, glory,
And a glorious career on the world’s great stages
Came to a sudden halt after a Manhattan debut
(I sang my *** off that night, he recounted)
Was met with mild praise, the odd bit of outright scorn
And a healthy dose of apathy.  
I ‘spose, he said between sips, I could have done all right
Givin’ lessons, singin’ bit parts here and there.
You’re on the road a lot, but the money ain’t bad,
But one day, just before an audition for a supporting role
In a regional production of Carmen
Up in Binghamton ******* New York,
He simply left the theatre, got into his car,
And drove some sixteen hours
Until he hit town here, and then he stayed.
But, I countered, why not go back?
The years of lessons and Julliard,
All for celebrating our refuse and squalor
With roadkill requiems, arias for rats?  
Well, some days it’s a hard way to make a living,
He said, stroking his chin thoughtfully,
But it does give me a venue to sing,
And, to date, I ain’t been panned by no **** cat.

Any gift which is lauded may become a curse
If it denies one office, or lightens the purse.
Though I once drank deep of the sweetness of favor,
My visions bear the taint of unpleasant flavor.
I have become, it seems, an inconvenience
Not to be moved aside with relative lenience,
But to be swatted roughly like some irksome fly,
To be excised as a nagging, untimely sty
An irritant which confounds and clouds one’s vision.
I stand before you, an object of derision,
A dustbin to collect your calumny and scorn
(Paraded in the roughest cloth, hair rudely shorn)
Likened to that which falls from a donkey’s behind.
No matter, then—one finds that young thoughts in an old mind
Foment suspicion rather than learned debate,
(Though I would likely decline to participate)
The upshot being unpleasant realities.
So shake your fists, and mouth your banalities,
Yoke me with the verdict of trial by fire.
You shall, soon enough, do your dance with the pyre.

i.

Such is their reward, then,
This graceful bridge bisecting the lake at Bemus Point,
Not far from the spot where Bishop Vincent
Parsed the geography of the holy land,
Narrow beaches fronting a higgledy-piggledy of cottages,
Most comfortable but staid,
Though the odd McMansion grotesquerie
Has sprouted here and there,
Courtesy of some frozen-food magnate in Buffalo
Or casino second-in-command from Niagara Falls
(Those more famous waters, apparently,
Insufficient to slake ones thirst for the gaudy)
In any case, likely no more than admired from afar
By those generations of boys
Who, leaving their spot on the line at Crescent Tools
Or fields rife with bumble-striped heifers,
Never returned, drill press unmanned, corn crib unattended.

ii.

You’d been on those waters once, however,
Spending an afternoon both bewitching and idyllic
On a dock fronting a relatively humble beach bungalow
(A friend of a family friend or relative’s place,
The whos and whys lost to the manila folders of recollection)
With a girl of ten, perhaps twelve at the outside,
Beautiful in an untrammeled manner,
Or at least primarily, unconsciously so,
And you remember her having green eyes
Which utterly belied description
(Though that was all long ago,
Such reminiscence likely no more than the rheuminess of memory,
And you have not returned to that shoreline since.)

iii.

Such daydreams are perilous, on many levels,
At seventy miles per hour even more so,
And you shake yourself back to the present
While approaching yet another bridge
(Humble span noting humble beginnings)
Honoring the region’s most famous daughter and her husband,
Who did indeed have much ‘splaining to do,
As you proceed eastbound toward Salamanca
(Wholly owned by the Seneca Nation,
Those non-native descendants of Mertzes and McGillicuddys
Paying rent and fealty to the tribe each year)
And thence to the slump-shouldered hills
Which shelter the sauntering Allegheny,
The pines thick, green, inscrutable,
Beyond our everday squabbles,
Answerable to nothing but time itself.

There’s many legends told of those who tended to the nets
Whose talents brought grown men to tears, made bookies hedge their bets.
One man’s special gift was to make the goal lamp glow
Therein begins the woeful tale of Red Light Racicot.

The story starts at Granby in Quebec’s junior ranks,
Where pimply youths have slapshots which seem fired from tanks,
And flashy cat-quick goaltenders will often steal the show;
Alas, no such heroics came from Red Light Racicot.

The ease he was beat stick-side left his goalie coaches dumb.
Granby supporters prayed as one that they would trade the ***
They called him “Ancient Mariner” (stopping one in three or so),
Surely Les Habitants would not sign Red Light Racicot.

But indeed, Les Canadiens dragooned him in the draft,
Fully convincing one and all that Serge Savard was daft.
Children throughout the province prayed Dear merciful God, No!
Don’t let our Forum bear the taint of Red Light Racicot.

But then came a stretch where Patrick Roy’s work had been poor,
And Hayward and Vinny Riendeau had each been shown the door.
And Montreal fans heard the saddest words they’d ever know:
…Starting in goal this evening is Red Light Racicot.

He flailed at wobbly wristers and wound up on his ****.
And gave up much more five-hole than any village ****.
Even cross-check befogged Savard knew it was time to go
And mercifully, he released poor Red Light Racicot

In Heaven there’s a glowing rink where gods of hockey skate:
Maurice Richard, Howie Lorenz, all of the truly great.
In one net, Georges Vezina makes saves with stick and toe
But someday they’ll all float soft goals past Red Light Racicot.

The girls all made it out, though they’d scrambled:
Some wearing only the slinky tools-of-the-trade lingerie,
Others slightly more dishabille,
Clad in no more than a towel or men’s shirt
Offered up by a client in exchange
For not being caught in flagrante delicto.
There’d been no doubt who set the fire;
The boy had been right there the whole the whole time,
An had copped to the whole thing
(Without any prompting, extraordinary or otherwise)
To the sheriff’s boys on the spot,
Not that he would not have been first on the list of suspects,
As all and sundry knew he’d been barking mad
Since puberty had ambushed him,
With no one to mitigate the volcanic shock
Yoked upon his mind and body,
Each littered with thoughts and clumps of hair
Both unrequested and unwanted,
Mysteries he bore the burden of alone,
Not dreaming to inflict them upon neither mother nor father
Nor the preacher at the hard-shell Baptist church
(The boy invariably in the front pew,
Alternately scowling and leering as the preacher
Railed against liquor and cards and fornicatresses.)
The sheriff had, frankly, no clue in hell
Just what to do with the boy,
So he’d kept him in the county lockup
While they decided whether to try him as an adult,
Send him to the boys’ school out near Valmeyer,
Or just send him back to his parents
In the hope they could knock some sense into him,
But he’d hooted and howled and pounded the walls so much
They’d sent him to the juvy bughouse down in Carbondale,
After which he’d pretty much disappeared to myth and memory,
Save for the occasional regretful opinion
That he should have burned the house further outside town
(What with it being no more than a glorified barn,
Plus the girls there were a decidedly unclean lot,
Having continued to service the Cardinals’ minor leaguers
From across the river in Keokuk,
Even after they started to sign black boys)
And the story, though its veracity a subject of debate its ownself,
Of how he’d masturbated while the house burned,
Spilling his seed onto the burning embers
Until, seeing his flaccid, doomed member in his hand,
He’d broken down into a fit of inconsolable crying,
Beyond hope, beyond any possible reclamation.

He is not without dreams, without aspirations;
He simply knows them by their true name,
Knows they are alloyed and somewhat compromised,
The musings and misapprehensions of mortal men,
And he knows that his finalities outweigh and outnumber
Such things he has yet to realize,
Those lesser grails which tantalize and tease
Even though he knows their possession is far outweighed
By that gleaned from the pursuit.
But no matter, then--he has duties to fulfill,
Tithes to pay, promises made and, as such, to be kept.
There is the sun, after all, and the warmth of day
Sometimes not unlike that of mid-August,
Though the nights have lengthened perceptibly,
Their depth and chill implacable in their advance.

He was holding court between sets at the Texas Bar
(Not his usual stomping grounds, necessarily,
But the owner was a decent guy whose checks were good,
And a Wednesday night gig pretty much found money)
Going slow and easy with a scotch and soda of uncertain labels,
Having come to rest at that station where, as he sighs it,
Wallet tells me I prefer well drinks to the top shelf.
He’d been, if not a name name, at least recognizable
(He has posters showing him sharing the bill with the heavies,
Redding and Bo Diddley and Jackie Wilson,
Smaller font for sure, but there nonetheless)
Getting a little air play,
Even outside of niche Detroit and Chicago stations,
And one song which peaked
All the waaaaay up at seventy-eight on the chart.
Lotta uncertain buses and club owners
Who never quite caught me later,
He muses, a touch ruefully, but he finds some solace
(Indeed, he has become quite adept
At finding comfort where he can)
But, if he has not exactly prospered, he has carried on carryin’ on,
Getting steady work here or Chicago or Gary,
The odd campus Motown nostalgia gig in Lansing or Ann Arbor,
Even six or eight weeks in Florida
(Nice to be the young guy in the room for once, he all but cackles)
Covering the tunes the headliners sang in his day,
And perhaps one could say he is a Fleance or Percival,
Plodding onward from the wreckage of great man all around him,
But such contemplation is a luxury,
The province of lake houses and brokerage accounts,
Though he is fond of holding his thumb and forefinger
Spread apart just so,
And telling the listener I was this close to hittin’ it big,
Invariably following that assertion with a chuckle,
‘Course, that might not be measured to scale.

i. “…THE SAME FORCE AND EFFECT AS AN ORDER OF FILIATION…”

She’d said she wasn’t expecting or demanding a ******* thing
(It’s probably your kid, she said, But I wouldn’t swear to it)
And his buddies swore he was crazier than a ******* rat
To even think about going along with the whole idea
After she all but given him a Get Out Of Jail Free card,
But he’d gone ahead and signed all the paperwork
Which, in the eyes of the state and the child-support folks,
Made him the one true father of this baby-to-be.  
He couldn’t begin to explain
Why he hadn’t fought the notion tooth-and-nail,
Save for the occasional muttered Baby oughtta have a father,
But there was more to it that; he had a vague notion
That knowing half of who you were was worse
Than having no knowledge at all, your whole reason for being
Becoming the exploration of odd hunches and unrealized fears,
The study of every man that crossed your mother’s path
In the hope (or, more likely, the absolute and utter dread)
That you were glimpsing a part of your genetic destiny,
Though such a line of thought was probably just *******,
A product of Genesee Cream Ale philosophizing.
When the time came, he’d agreed
(An idea which reduced his friends
To mute amazement and slow, sad head shaking)
To be present at the birth,
And, after certain undertakings
He’d just as soon not have seen were complete,
The nurse (saying It’s a boy.  A big, beautiful healthy boy.)
Handed him a black-mouthed, screaming little mass,
Fists clenched tightly, entire body tensed
As if it realized just how inadvisable the whole situation was.
Faced with this tangible evidence of his ostensible patrimony,
He found himself unable to say anything except
*******.  **-lee ****.

ii. As The Old Joke Goes, “In The Morning?  
*****, I Don’t Respect You Now.”

He had, of course, forgotten her name,
Assuming he’d ever known it,
And so it had been chica and hija and amada all night,
Though, to be fair, she couldn’t remember
If he was Juan or Jhonny or Jesus;
She simply remembered that he was Colombian,
All dark hair and bright smiles and quite tall
Although that could have just been a trick of the eye,
As his friends were all compact squatness,
Which she had pointed out  while they were dancing,
To which he’d subsequently horse-laughed out loud.
Chica, he’d fairly shouted over the music,
The best way to be good looking is to have ugly friends.
He’d come to Batavia to hunker down for winter
After the wineries had buttoned things up for the season,
Spending his time catching odd jobs here and there;
Anything to get by, he’d said with the most outrageous of winks.  
She’d had no intention, none whatsoever, of taking him home,
But anything to get by takes in any multitude of sins,
Venal and otherwise.
She woke up about two-thirty or so, all damp with sweat
And the remnants of *******,
To see him awake and getting dressed.
Before she could say a thing, he put a finger to her lips.
Shhh chica, he said softly and soothingly,
Like he was trying to hush an infant,
I got some stuff I really need to take care of;
Look, we’ll get breakfast, OK?
You know the Bob Evans out by the highway? Six o’ clock, eh?
And with that, it was a quick, almost brotherly, peck on the cheek,
Then he was gone, so stealthily that she was briefly unsure
That he’d ever indeed been there at all.
Breakfast, can you imagine she thought
As she rolled over to get some sleep,
Like I’m even awake at such an hour.

iii. We Don’t Ask For Directions, And We Sure As Hell Don’t Make Lists

There had been no blowup, no volcanic incidents of infidelity
No grotesque financial stupidity;  
The china and glasses had remained unbroken,
The plaster-and-lath not displaced
By the seismic slamming of doors.
It had been slow, subtle,
Like the slow unraveling of a thread here in there
Opening up a gaping hole in a old comfortable sweater,
Or how the unhurried seeping of water
Would occasionally cause an outcropping of rock
To tumble into the gorges over at Letchworth.  
Oh, there had probably been the proverbial last straw:
Maybe the new refrigerator that didn’t fit through a single door
In the entire house (and who in hell bought something like that
Without taking measurements anyway)
Or the foolhardy extended warranty on the Volvo,
Which had **** near a hundred and fifty thousand miles on it
And had no more trade-in value
Than a Matchbox miniature of the model,
But it any case, the immediate cause
Was probably more symptom than disease, anyway.
He’d packed a couple of bags with the basics
To ****, shave, shower and dress,
And jumped into the ancient but well-protected wagon,
Heading to God only knows where:
His brother in York, maybe,
Or his mom’s place way the hell up in Tupper Lake,
(Not that he had the stomach for the questions and sidelong looks That particular destination entailed)
But about ten miles out he realized
He’d forgotten his ******* bike.
****, ****, stupid **** he said,
Pounding the steering wheel in rhythm;
The notion of going back like some dumb-*** eight-year-old,
All hang-dog look and tail between his legs
Was not particularly appealing,
But the notion of having to **** time
Without the prospect of a bike ride
(Wind in what was left of his hair,
The barking in his calves as he climbed an incline,
The whole **** freedom of the thing)
Was simply too much to consider,
So he swung the car around and headed back.
She was, as he knew she would be,
Waiting in the doorway with the bike
(**** near sharing a brain after all this time, to be sure),
Her face hung with a look not really a smile or frown
Or anything that fit a definition,
But endearing all the same, and he heard a voice not quite his ask
Well, is it OK if I come in for a few minutes?

iv. The Bob Evans Out By The Highway

…the **** am I doing here anyway, she thought,
Staring down at the table, chunky taupe-ish coffee mugs
And logo plates, fine china for everyone and no one,
Set for two (she hadn’t ordered, she was waiting for someone)
The restaurant more or less empty,
Only the odd trucker or  some senior citizen
Who was still on rat-race time.
The clock had hit six-fifteen when she,
Eyes cloudy and threatening to ambush hastily applied mascara,
Was ready to flag down the waitress to let her know
That she was just a coffee, thanks, when he walked in,
No, burst in, like a madness of chrysanthemum
Where there had only been undifferentiated greenery
Mere moments before.
I’m sorry, chica, he said, bending over to kiss her cheek,
This whole life thing gets in the way sometimes, eh?
He sat down, slapping the table with both hands
Man, he said, all but snorting, I could eat a horse,
And what better place than this, mmm?

John Lee Townes nodded sadly, knowingly
From his perch at the Come On Inn
Heard the ambulance boys
Needed two trips to get her out
(But John Lee an untrustworthy witness if there ever was one,
Prone to drunken blackout and sober embellishment
One step from rehab and two steps from the loony bin)
Though the facts at hand
Were short on gore, long on the mundane;
Peggy Rabish (her possessions few, her jewelry cheap)
Was found bruised, but not ******,
Lying in a profane yet oddly peaceful position
Of mock prayer or sleep.
As passers-by gawked,
Whispering inventions, plausible and otherwise,
Concerning jilted boyfriends and rich aunts,
Rummaging through their own memories
In search of credible alibis,
The state boys, diligent and professionally bored,
Secured the crime scene in their yellow-tape fashion.
Suspects?  One trooper barked, ****, just look around here.
****-heads, drunks, welfare cheats,
You tell me who the hell isn’t?
The park manager nodded rhythmically, disinterestedly,
Half-listening as he turned his collar up against the chill,
His thoughts focused in filling this soon-to-be empty lot,
Vacancies and felonies being equally bad for business.

Tanks roll
implacably;
Radio Free Europe
plays “On Broadway”, ode to pawnshops,
pimps, ******.

He'd always been able to slip it on and off,
Puttin' the tux on, as he put it;
He'd often told his wife
(A legit beauty, real glamour top to bottom)
I may be scruffy little ***-*** Walden Cassotto in here,
But once I go outside, I'm Bobby Darin
And I ******* well make sure they don't forget it.
But it was a garment much like the ones he wore
Back at All Boys in the Bronx, a hand-me-down thing,
From some third-tier department store or Army -Navy,
A little too worn here, a little patched too often there,
Unable to mask the real whos and whys and wherefores
Of a decidedly gilded-cage existence,
And while he was musing ad infinitum
Upon the vicissitudes of Sukey ****** and Lotte Lenya,
There there were things going down  
Away from The Flamingo and Golden Nugget,
And begun to suspect that he was on the wrong stage,
So he chucked it all in-- the cars, the studio sessions,
The club gigs, even the sequin-sparkle wife,
Opting to hunker down into a small camper
(A decidedly acoustic model at that)
Eschewing the hairpiece and putting on glasses,
Looking like just one more Summer-Of-Love refugee
Wandering down the coastline
Seeking some pastoral ***-primed epiphany,
And he was looking, suspecting it was more likely
That he wouldn't know it for sure until it snuck up on him,
So he waited, plucking a dime-store six string
In a ratty old lawn chair by the door of the cub camper,
The tuxedo inside, either as a hedge or habit,
Though as he invariably told the occasional visitor
Thing ain't no more empty on a hanger
Than it was on my shoulders.

You’d had just enough change to pick it up at the Hall’s gift shop,

As you’d ate sparsely at the down-on-its luck diner

Where the bus had stopped halfway or so through the trip out

(Just as well, given the place’s obvious indifference

To culinary innovation and cleanliness)

And you’d all but sprinted with it

From the cashier straight o the batting cage next door,

Inadvertently ending up in line for the machine

Which threw curveballs

(The kids ahead of you older, most likely high school players

Who made but weak contact with the pitches,

A dream dying a little with each weak tapper and foul-back)

And you went through a handful of futile swings

Before the final pitch came out of the machine,

Spinning oddly and refusing to break toward the plate,

Hitting you in the back with a dull, rubbery thud,

And your teacher, thick-middle man

Who had played a couple seasons in the Indians farm system,

Where he had faced Juan Pizarro (Son, his hook looked

Like it was coming in from first base)

Chuckled softly as he rubbed your back,

Saying It’s like I told you, kid,

This is a hard game.

Her parentage was a thing of considerable comment
Though a good deal less circumspection,
Mama's identity relatively sure, as everyone knew her mama,
Her father one of a laundry list of unpromising gardeners,
Yet she was a child of grace--no, more than that
An outlier in every sense of the word,
The dazzling unintended consequence
Resulting from a series of unwise and unhappy choices.
She sauntered (though there are those romantically inclined sorts
Who would insist she outright floated,
Her feet rarely if ever touching ground)
By the courthouse in Okolona most afternoons,
And though her dress was from the house of Ralston and Purina
And her jewelry courtesy of Sailor Jack and Bingo,
She neither shrunk nor slunk self-consciously
Nor walked with eyes ablaze and fists clenched,
In a manner asking Mebbe you wanna make sumpin' of it?
Simply walked her own walk,
Such things as poverty and pedigree
Trvial matters beneath her concern,
Though she was always provided for, as a seemingly chosen child,
Judge Hibbard giving her a store-bought doll from Jackson
When she turned seven, others providing her pop and bubble gum,
And later Miss Lucille Brisker sewed her a bright-blue silk dress
Plus gave her forty-two dollars for a Greyhound ticket
To Los Angeles via New Orleans
(When she hopped the bus in front of the K &B,
She gave her a peck on the cheek, and said
Miss Lucille, you take care, but I doubt
I'm much likely to pass this way again.)
Her whys and wherefores after that were lost to time and tide:
Perhaps she made it in L-A, perhaps she thought else-wise
And hopped off the bus in Hattiesburg or Bogalusa
Though most were of the opinion that it mattered little if at all,
As she allowed them, leastways for a little while,
To be in her orbit while she shone in such a manner as pleased her.

He’d never read him, understand,
At least not that he’d remembered;
Might have half-skimmed something in Look or Esquire,
But he certainly wasn’t much for novels,
And there were kids to raise to rise, a war to fight
(His platoon had been pinned down at Anzio,
Leaving him precious little time for dispatches from the front,
Save  for a  singular postcard
He’d bought in Netunno on a rainy April afternoon,
On which he’d scratched Babe, I’m still alive and kickin’,
Worth ten thousand words
To a harried, frightened seventeen-year-old,
With one in the cradle and one on the way),
But then all that was later on, or earlier
Depending on where you stood,
Time being a lazy, molasses-unhurried thing to him now,
Like the leisurely old Owasco Inlet which ran through town,
Seeming to go in no direction in particular,
Running north or south as it deemed fit at the moment.
Once, he’d worked at the typewriter plant on Spring Street,
Fashioning hammers and slugs for Standards and Silents
And, later on, the electric Coronets and Model 250s
Until he packed it in with forty-five years under his belt,
Though all that pretty much the stuff of memory as well:
The factory gone a couple years now,
Rubble carted away, leaving an angry brown patch of land,
The last generation who’d worked the plant
Having up and left, by and large,
In most cases taking his generation with it as well
(Factories tending to be family affairs,
So many of his contemporaries unwilling to be so distant
From children and grandchildren,
Such notions being unknown in company towns)
Leaving the place a touch foreign,
A bit alien to folks who stayed on,
Men without a country as it were, doing their level best
To navigate waters without landmarks, without buoys,
Trying to reach harbors of questionable refuge.

Know this—I am well acquainted with the wolf,
Well versed in his ways, his demeanor,
His dispassionate relentlessness,
His pitiless focus on hunt and hunted,
His workaday disdain of pity.
There are those who would laud the mythical Spartan lad
Who hid the wolf beneath his cloak,
Affecting some gallant stoicism
As the beast consumed him without restraint,
But I say to you that is a mere romantic fallacy,
A wanton failure to apprehend the true moral.
I have learned that there is no accommodation,
No covenant to be reached with the wolf,
And any attempt to do so is merely to invite destruction,
And so I choose to engage him openly, without reservation,
Rolling tail-over-teacup in the streets,
Attempting to hold his jaws open with bare hands
While those who find such battle unseemly and uncouth
Jeer and hoot from porch and portico.
No matter, for I will continue to meet the cur on my terms,
For staid suffering in the hopes
Of reaching some accord with the beast
Is the not the act of the noble sage:
It is the mock heroics of the coward,
The sad acquiescence of the simpering fool.

****, they may as well have started holding hands
And making paper dolls together,
The way they carried on
Back in the neighborhood after push came to shove,
Like none of it ever happened:
All the times they spit on us,
The constant **** and ******* and goya,
The ***-kickings if we went one alley too far.
Peace didn’t last; hell, it couldn’t
It’s just the way things have to be, man.
If I ever got in front of some parole board
(Not that I’ll ever have that chance,
As I ain’t goin’ anywhere unless they send me
To Auburn or Attica for some change of pace)
This is what I’d tell ‘em:
You come home to your nice house
In your tidy little sub-development
After a day at Corning or IBM,
And you find out that some punk
Has ******* one of your daughters
And stuck a shiv into her quarterback boyfriend,
What are you gonna do if you find him
Hiding in one of your neighbor’s rosebushes?
Exactly. Save the taxpayers the expense of a trial.

Musta been a year, maybe eighteen months ago,
This bunch of goody-goody types,
All social workers and sweet boys,
Show up here to put on some **** play
Where this guy’s uncle kills his dad
And starts puttin’ the blocks to his mom,
And for hours it’s nothing but yak, yak, yak.
And I’m thinking Man, could you just ice the guy, already.
Let me tell you, I’ve never seen ‘Nardo’s ghost
(Let alone that ******’ ******’s one)
But if he ever shows,
It ain’t gonna be to accuse me of nothin’;
No, he’d smile and shake my hand,
Because I did what the code said you gotta do.  
Just what the code said.

It was the night of the thundersnow,
Meteorological harpie normally reserved for our northern brethren.
She stood grimly at the window,
In wait for a dawn which would not come
Save for the odd light, the incongruous rumbling,
Mock forbearer of those easy languid evenings of August.
She'd made some noise approximating a sigh,
Then returned to undress,
I hurriedly unlacing my boots, removing my pants,
(My feigned nonchalance a foolish, pitiable thing)
And I remember her ******* as  oddly demure,
Her ******* bewitching gumdrops,
The triangle below her waist downy, almost kittenish.
I'd broken her maiden clumsily, eagerly, all unheeding haste.
We'd lain next to each other for a short while afterwards
(The schools already closed for the next day,
Her father recently gone to the boneyard on Ludlow Hill,
She soon to be shuttled off to some spinster aunt in Dillsboro.)
I'd nattered on about summer vacations and thens and laters;
She'd said little, simply studying me with the bemused half-smile
One saves for sad dreamers not intimate with the knowledge
That notions of tomorrow and forever are strictly for suckers,
And as I strolled home come mid-morning,
The sun implacably straddled the sky,
Leaving the sidewalks and shoulders of the road
Completely dry, as if the night before had been a thing
Of perhaps-only, of dreams and tales for a later time.

When you appear (as we all shall, no doubt)
Before the oldest judge in the world,
Take care to notice his appearance;
You’ll see that his robe is frayed about the collar,
And that the cuffs, though expertly repaired,
Are worn and threadbare,
For he has been upon the bench for what seems eons,
(Case files scattered about heedlessly, his gavel mislaid)
And though you beseech him
With your borrowed chants and learned pleadings,
It is unlikely that he shall do anymore than look up imperceptibly
Dismissing you with a short, disdainful wave of his hand,
For your case is like a thousand others,
And your entreaties and supplications
No longer interest him.

I can understand, then, you would find such thoughts
Sobering, Indeed disconcerting;
It is not necessarily pleasant to realize
That we are but as toy boats which,
Once pushed away from shore by some small boy
Soon distracted by other, shinier trinkets,
Drift aimlessly across a pond
Which offers neither shelter nor safe harbor.
We are, then, all on our own,
Misbegotten creatures linked together
By nothing more noble of purpose
Than our own self-interest;
Oh, do not misunderstand me,
For I am not advocating (Heaven forbid!)
Some wholesale violation of commandments:
The spectre of patricide,
The hair-trigger roiling of the blood brought to bear
By the untrustworthy business partner, the faithless lover.  
I merely suggest it is wise to remember
That as we float along the stream of this life
(It being rank and  befouled, chock-a-block
With garbage, broken bottles, discarded condoms)
No hand is on the tiller save our own.  
But enough of this dark and dour philosophy!
Let us finish our draughts and return to our rooms,
There to sleep the sleep of the just,
During this long winter’s night
Which seems all but without end.

They'd lived on the flats, humdrum home in a prosaic town.
Those gabled edifices perched on hilltops
Beyond their means, perhaps,
But certainly beyond their needs;
Their children had cribbed at the foot of their bed
To the detriment of sleep and other night-time activities,
And they'd later shared a room, learning early on
That life was often a make-do vocation,
But could be rife with joys in spite of that.
The kids moved on, to mirth and mortgages of their own,
Their parents resolute in their desire to stay put,
Eschewing the siren song of some trailer court in Sarasota,
Some gator-patrolled condo in St. Pete,
Choosing to confront the seemingly never-ending residue
Of stubborn low pressure systems
Lugubriously wandering up the St. Lawrence valley
For weeks upon end,
The humidity and mosquito-laced all too brief summers
(Though, on those nights where no pop-up thunderstorm
Threatened to chase them back inside,
They would sit on the porch, peering at the gravelly old hills,
And he would whistle some tune from some long ago,
Perhaps pulling her out of her chair,
Dancing a slow and somewhat unsteady waltz
While he did his damnedest to stay on key.)

Once (not that long ago, perhaps, though we likely know better)
The summers were languid, liquid things without end
Each day fully equipped with a high sky,
The blue so all-encompassing, so all consuming,
That lazy fly ***** seemed to disappear
As if God had scooped them up like so many routine grounders.
We played, in a field long since abandoned
To crownvetch and scrub grass,
Twenty one--five points for those *****
The celestial powers had bobbled
And we were able to catch on the fly,
Three points if we took it on the hop,
One if we safely trapped it before it rolled stone dead,
And so our Julys and Augusts fluttered by,
Every bit lazy and aimless as butterflies or knuckleballs,
With the exception of the de riguer tribunals
In which the assembled debated and determined
Where bounce ended and roll began,
Where shoestring catch was reduced to single-point trap.

It all came to an end, of course;
At some point, we crossed a line
(Undelineated but firmly established nonetheless)
Where it was no longer advisable to attempt this at home,
Mere joy no longer an acceptable substitute for proficiency.
Find something else to do, kid, we were told,
And the bats went to the back of the closet,
The gloves and ***** consigned to a spot
(Where we would surely remember to find them)
Behind some canned tuna and Christmas lights,
The fastball blurring by us now,
The field a warren of subdevelopments and cul-de-sacs.

And so you’d forgotten,
Or perhaps just suppressed, the whole notion;
There were, after all, a gaggle of coupon books
With return addresses from an ever-changing confusion of banks,
Sales on pasta and milk, other fees and foundations
Politely requesting ones attention,
So you couldn’t be sure
That it was really the crack of an old thick-handled Adirondack,
Or the comforting thwick of the ball landing squarely
In the pocket of a Wilson A-2000,
Yet when you wandered to the window and peered out,
There they were, looking straight up at you,
Waving their hands like childlike Prosperos
Gesturing to reveal some fairytale glen.  
Come on back, they are saying, and you go down,
Powerless to resist, even if you had wanted to,
Returned instantly, seamlessly to a time and place
Where a shout of I got it! I got it!
Was all the prerequisite or vitae that was required,
And you are unable to bring even mock-edginess to your voice
When you insist I got that cleanly on the hop.  That’s three points.

April is the cruelest month, so some poet said,
Likely vexed to the breaking point by its coquettish nature,
Alternately promising and withdrawing
Sweetness of the warm sun, rustling green blankets of leaves,
The flirtatious, intoxicating perfume
Of the violet and lily of the valley.
For all its coy fluttering of eyelids,
April may delay but never denies,
Yielding its lover’s bounty and then some
To suitors ardent and otherwise.
Its forerunner of two moons prior promises no such delights,
No flora-and-fauna maidenhood as recompense for devotion;
It is the time of purification, of the purge,
A time where light is at a premium,
Often coveted but rarely apprehended, its fleeting manifestations Matters of obfuscation as opposed to illumination,
Soon to be supplanted by fierce meteorological harpies
Short on subtlety but long on effectiveness,
Carrying away those not equipped to resist its peculiar charms
(The too-early runt calf, the aged and nearly-blind collie
Trotting to an unfamiliar field or wood lot,
The newly-solo grandparent acquiescing to the song of the abyss),
The unfortunates consigned to some crypt
Or undisturbed corner of barn or basement,
Proper farewells set aside for some indeterminate time
When it is feasible to block out the knowledge
That the springtime is promised to no man or beast,
Especially at such an interval
Where so little seems to separate one from the other.

The cast is ever changing, be it at Old Eli its ownself
Or various other institutions, most sans ivy,
Their distinguished here-and-gones
A touch short of presidents and laureates,
And certainly the songbook has changed
(Out with the Crosby and Waring,
In with the Cobain and the Stryper)
But certain verities, gnawing and implacable,
Remain unchanged, the inevitable realization
That, for all one's promise, all of our ilk
Have preceded us in our arrival, flush with pride and promise,
And made the odd ripple or two, perhaps,
Before shambling onward to other things
(Very rarely bigger and better, sadly enough)
And all those songs we sang and steins we hoisted
Have now been consigned to less fashionable quarters
In the anterooms of memory,
The melodies and laughter filtered, transformed, muted
The sound not unlike the slightly discomfiting bleatings
Of some distant barnyard animal.

i.

I smile, sometimes, thinking of how I liked the old Byrds tunes
Back in my seminary days, for I have come to know
(Mostly by these cucumbers, hostas, and ****** dandelions)
That there is very much a season for all things,
For our run in this plane is strictly proscribed,
And having the end date somewhat fixed
A blessing from God, in fact,
For it makes one focus on those things
That are truly meaningful,
To appreciate when there is need to make fine gradations
(For if you plant the peas and parsley just a couple of days,
Indeed mere hours too early, an unexpectedly still and cold night
May steal all of your labors, leaving you with tiny, lifeless shoots
Slumped over the lip of a clay ***)
And when not to waste sound and fury, as it were,
Over the most trifling of things;
For, when the final ascertainment is made, it will not be as an audit,
(Saint Peter himself staring over his glasses
As he punches the calculator,
Clucking as he reviews the number of bottoms in the pews,
The weight of the collection plate,
The state of the cement or flagstone
Leading to the stairs of the cathedral),
But an over-long movie, the seemingly most insignificant of scenes
Screened several times (if it please God) for your viewing pleasure.

ii.

For I have sinned, yes, most exceedingly,
Dear Saints and My Lord,
In lack of thought and foresight, in the expedient holding
Of my tongue, in the unthinking failure to act.
Mea culpa
Mea culpa
Mea maxima culpa.
Blessed ******, I cannot,
In the self-serving pride of my guilt,
Ask you to pray for my soul,
But I would pray that, perhaps,
I will have had the briefest of moments
Where I was not totally unworthy.

iii.

I was, at one time, a different lifetime to me now
Part of the Bishop’s diocesan staff in Boston,
Great city of pristine churches
Surrounded by blooms of all the colors He could bring
And shanty Irish rough as the day the boat landed
(One size Fitz all, the joke was back in those days)  
I was more functionary than rising star in the hierarchy,
Nicknamed “The Bishop’s Travel Agent”,
My function was to find a place for those priests
Who had become , in the vernacular, “troublesome”,
Sending priests whose comforting
Of the younger females among his flock
Strayed over the line of purely spiritual
To some remote Aroostook village
Or, if such problems ran more to altar boys,
Some convent in the Berkshires.
We were, so I told myself, being judicious,
And all in the best interests of the Church.
One time we were wrong, horribly wrong;
There was a suicide, whispers,
Letters which should have been burned.
Many of my colleagues complained, bitterly,
That I had been made
An unworthy scapegoat for the Bishop,
But I knew in my soul such an assertion
Was merely halfway correct.

iv.

Yet perhaps I will—no, indeed, I must—be saved,
For our Lord is good, and Christ shall have mercy,
And exchange this long walk through foolishness and vanity
With life everlasting, even for those of us
Who have stumbled along clumsily,
Unthinkingly, unheedingly upon Your creation.
Kyrie, eleison;
Christe, eleison;
Kyrie, eleison.

v.


It is good, then; the days have been dry
And unusually warm, the nights cool
Yet without the danger of frost.
The beans and tomatoes should thrive,
And the sunflowers should grow
Well… like sunflowers, one would surmise.
As for myself, the good days
Are examples of His grace,
The bad ones no more than I can bear,
And the doctors (mere men, after all)
Minister to me as well as men can.
I have, blessedly, no trepidation
As relates to the close of my small one-act play
On this patch of earth.  
Indeed, I am often cheered
That I have seen small green shoots
Rising from the years of fallen leaves
Which I have raked up and dumped upon the brush lot
Between the church itself
And the old graveyard at the rear of the property.

Now how to figger what makes a feller tick?
They’re hot and they’re cold and they’re nothin’ at all.
(Th’ persuasive arts ain’t no match for a brick.)

A body can stand herself pretty and slick
But he’ll hem and he’ll haw and harrumph an’ stall
Now how to figger what makes a feller tick?

I’d much rather take on a lion that’s sick
Than a certain mouse backed up ‘gin a wall.
(Th’ persuasive arts ain’t no match for a brick.)

Wish I had a gris-gris or some other trick
So’s I could hold a certain feller in thrall;
Now how to figger what makes a feller’ tick?

Sof’ words and June moons—why, they ain’t worth a lick
If your life is just one big free-for-all
(Th’ persuasive arts ain’t no match for a brick.)

Your poor hawt cries a river an’ beats real quick
When love takes you down like a cannonball.
Now how to figger what makes a feller’ tick?
(Th’ persuasive arts ain’t no match for a brick.)

She slumped by the archway of the Chapel,
Forlorn, beaten in fact;
She had come to these grounds from Plattsburgh,
(Cold, martial little city home to General Wood’s summer flings)
To lay a wreath she’d bought near the train station at Bayeux
Purchased from a women at a small shop table,
Who’d had the grace not to haggle over-much,
Knowing full well why someone would make such a purchase.
She’d hoped to lay it at her brother’s marker;
He’d been lost at Omaha, likely before he’d set foot on the sand
(She’d no ideas of such things at the time,
Death being a thing that happened to rabbits
Their old shepherd chased down in the back yard,
Or dolls beheaded courtesy of her younger brother)
But the plot number given to her with such confidence
By the young adjutant from the War Department
Had a name wholly unknown to her
(Where the information was bollixed she had no way of knowing,
Not that officialdom would be any more help to her,
With so many sons in Scranton,
So many husbands in Hamtramck,
So many fathers and brothers in the same boat)
And so she sat, overwhelmed with the distance she’d come,
The magnitude of her failure and its implications,
And the whole **** burden of simple humanity
When she was approached by an older man,
Who clearly resided nearby
(Why he was here less evident—the hush of the venue, perhaps,
Possibly some corporal he was indebted to).
He’d understood her predicament in an instant,
No doubt a scene he’d witnessed scores of times before,
Laissez-le sur un monument funéraire,
He crooned, patting her forearm
Ce n’est pas important, and he sauntered away.
She’d considered heeding his advice,
But she remained hostage
To some vestige of latter-day Babbitesque can-do,
And so she soldiered back toward the endless rows of marble,
Stretching out in endless parallel lines
As in some middle-school perspective perspective drawing
Without borders, without end.