Perhaps it was her voice itself, clear and simple,
Unalloyed by any classically trained fol-de-rol,
Or possibly the nature of her faith
Displayed with such clarity, such transparency
By that very instrument,
But in any case, she had utterly bewitched the populace
Of the place known as Ahwaga by her distant cousins,
And when she stood on the Delaware & Hudson platform
The next morning, they had cheered her lustily,
All but begging her You must return to us,
But the train had lost its footing on a sharp grade
Mere hundreds of yards before making the station at Deposit,
And she was lost in the carnage and conflagration.
The townspeople she had said her farewells to that morning
Were distraught, their feelings a mix of grief
And an odd sense of culpability, a nagging misgiving
That perhaps this was an omen, some augury
Denoting that their own faith was not up to scratch,
And so they had taken her back to their own burgh
To bury her in a manner befitting her piety
(She had been travelling with siblings,
But they acquiesced to the plan, though how willingly
Not wholly apparent at the time,
And made no clearer through the ramble of time)
And so she was laid to rest in a plot
Surrounded by ornate fencing, her grave marked
By an obelisk pointing unambiguously to her Heaven,
And it is said that, on autumn evenings
When the breeze rustle the dying leaves just so,
You can hear the spirits of her Mohawk brethren
Come down from Quebec, murmuring songs
Telling of the spirits living in the trees and hedgerows,
Spoken in the ancient tongue
Of the languid, unhurried Susquehanna far below.

I mean no disrespect, understand;
Larry Tate is a hell of a guy,
But if you can’t wrangle up a showgirl or ****** on short notice,
You have no business calling yourself an ad man.
Likewise, the Stephens kid gets results
(God only knows how he carries off
Some of the last-minute miracles he pulls out of his ***)
But you gotta keep him away from the money clients;
Too skittish, too much of a loose cannon.  
No, every agency needs a core principle,
A philosophy to anchor itself on;
You remember the first big campaign we did?
You call that a suit?  Mine’s an Irving Freibush.
That was my baby, and let me tell you,
I didn’t need a focus group
Or some fifty-thousand dollar demographic study
To figure out if the ******* desk
The model was leaning against should be oak or cherry.  
I knew it would work,
Because I knew what every ad man
(And preacher and politician, for that matter)
Worth a **** knows as well as he knows his own name;
That everyone, deep inside, feels they are not quite right,
That they’re a little slow, a little shabby,
A little less than their fellow man.
We just (quietly, mind you) reinforce that notion a bit,
And present them a shinier, newer band-aid.
Anyway, the ads worked like gangbusters,
And it always gave me the jollies that both Hef and Billy Graham
Each had a closet full of those suits.  
Look, what we do isn’t rocket science or parlor tricks,
But a bunch of ******* figures
At the bottom line of the ledger book?
Now that, boys and girls, is ******* magic.

No one may contest that a contract existed
Between my client and the respondent;
This much is beyond debate,
Nor did the plaintiff in any way compel
This miller’s-daughter-***-queen in any manner,
Unless one contends that providing a vehicle
To obtain all that she had ever desired
Somehow equates to coercion.
As to my learned colleague’s claim
That the imposition of so-called usurious terms by my client
Serves to render the agreement null and void,
May I remind you that at no point in this affair
Did the respondent decline to accept the quid pro quo;
Indeed, she happily re-negotiated the terms of the very pact
She now seeks to vacate!

Ah, opposing counsel claims, my client fulfilled the agreement
In accordance with the law.
I must say, rather sadly,
I find my distinguished friend’s definition of fulfillment
Very odd, indeed, as if the employment of industrial espionage,
Illegal trespass, surveillance methods of dubious legitimacy
(All of which were undertaken
To surreptitiously provide his client with such information
To exercise the out-clause of the agreement)
Is something the court should embrace
As a matter of statute or accepted practice.

Again, members of the jury, I know where your sympathies lie.
All along , opposing counsel has implied
We should celebrate his client’s pluckiness,
Her cunning and initiative,
Her stunning journey from rages to riches.
My friends, I would argue this;
There is, indeed, a moral to every story,
Are our obligations and promises, at the end of the day,
No more than the interview portion of some beauty pageant,
Where long blonde hair and a winning smile
Serve as just cause to blithely disregard those oaths?
Are the most sacred of vows
Less binding upon those whom Nature and the mirror
Have favored more so than those among us
Who are among the unattractive and underloved?
Ladies and gentlemen, it is up to you
To write the final chapter of our fable.
I thank you for your service.

Speak, O capricious ones, and lend a hand
To this sad wretch, who cannot understand
Why he has been abandoned and ignored,
His sad lamentations without reward
As he seeks to relate his paltry tale
(With the fullness of dread that he may fail
And the said rote thing which he may fashion
Devoid of truth and wanting of passion.)
So lift my sad tongue, then, and let me speak
Of those who failed to ascend life’s peak
So like the gods in manner and aspect,
Yet yoked tight to this plane by some defect,
Some dank pock-mark of humanity,
So we spray the gods with profanity
(Though the bray of an *** is what they hear
Not unlike that which I’ve put forth, I fear.)

That little girl was up here a few weeks ago,
She says with as much enthusiasm
As the hourly ad hoc ambassador
For her small, unremarkable corner can muster,
And she laughs, I mean she played that little girl--
Zuzu, that's the name-- in the movie.
Poor thing moves pretty slow now,
Had to tromp around with a cane and all.
I smile, not much less weary myself,
(Not quite halfway from Toledo to Boston,
Miles to go before I sleep and all that)
Having pulled off the Thruway in the hope
The village supported something
Which might be open on Christmas Eve.
She chatters on, noting she pulled this shift
As a favor to a younger counterpart,
Since her children were old enough to stay on their own,
(Not to mention old enough to refrain from bouncing out of bed
Before sunrise on Christmas morning),
Mentioning that Capra visited here once and only once,
But was somehow moved enough to center his tale here
(To be fair, the place is quaint enough,
But no more so than any number of burghs just like it)
And so the village fathers have tried to make hay
While the snow flies, as it were,
The town's main street done uo in the spitting image of the movie, Although it seems different, even mildly unsettling,
When the tableau is not in two dimensionial black-and-white
The waitress and I, all but marooned alone
In this small-town Upstate bar and grill,
Exchange pleasantries (More coffee, Hon?
Visitin' family out in Boston?)
And I pay at the register (cash only here,
And I make it a point to tip very merrily, indeed)
Then stroll the couple of blocks to the municipal lot,
The bridge that may have launched
A thousand angels clearly visible in the distance,
Passing by a large, gray-brick building
Which have been George Bailey's mixed blessing
Now bearing the logo of a large multi-national financial leviathan
Based in Hong Kong.

i.

The sisters are, like their brethren everywhere,
An amalgamation of gentle touch
And soothing words delivered in sepia tones
(Comrade, you will be up
And out of here before you know it)
In such a manner as to convince you
That they believe it to be true as well,
But I have made something of a living
In the interpretation of the unsaid,
And what I have seen in a certain knitting of their eyebrows,
An occasional tightness around the throat,
The set of the jaw as the doctor studies my chart,
And I suspect that this may be
The final station on my excursion,
The last listing on the timetable;
Indeed, as I click off the inventory of my own person
(The fever, the unsightly and damning rash)
I have come to the conclusion
That I may find the denouement of this particular tale
To be highly unsatisfactory reading.

ii.

I am at considerable leisure to think, reminisce,
And even, though wholly without purpose, to dream.  
On more than one occasion
I have drifted back to a certain train ride
(I was headed to the Congress of the Peoples of the East,
Not without some trepidation, I might add)
Traversing almost all of Mother Russia, from Murmansk to Baku.  
Oh, there was any number of wonders
To be viewed through the windows:
The broad, seemingly endless steppes,
The grandeur of the Urals and Caucasus
The wide, sluggish Irtysh,
But there were other sights,
Unsettling, almost portentous views as well:
Villages, burnt and abandoned,
Cows and horses so thin
Their hides appeared almost threadbare,
Peasants of all ages whose eyes gave evidence
Of seeing such pain, hunger and death
That it was a wonder they could still stand upright,
Or, indeed, have the desire to do so.  
We, conversely, rode, if not in the lap of luxury,
Comfortably indeed—no shortage of coffee and *****,
Even caviar on a more or less daily basis.
Finally, no longer able to contain discontented thoughts
(I knew my outburst would be reported back to the Comintern)
I said to the Red Army captain sharing my compartment
That it seemed incongruous, if not counter-revolutionary,
To be overfed when the backbone of the proletariat
Was starving and dying before our eyes,
That, surely, there was something we could do.  
As he walked from his seat  toward the window,
He smiled and said as he pulled them downward
Sometimes, the best thing we can do is to pull the shades.


iii.


Again, having a certain gift of observation
Proves to be a mixed blessing:
There are certain signs (the adjacent beds
Being placed a touch farther away,
A certain distance, physical and otherwise
By the doctors and nurses)
And it is clear to me that my remaining sunrises and sunsets
May be counted on fingers and toes,
And my musings have turned to my placement
After I am discharged from further ministrations,
And I find it somewhat amusing if not entirely suitable
That the epitaph upon my tombstone
(If I am afforded such a luxury;
It is far from certain that the pig-eyed Zinoviev
May not just have me thrown into some dungheap,
There to sate the desperate hunger of the cur and the swine)
Will be likely written in Cyrillic,
An idiom I found wholly perplexing and inscrutable.

It has been stamped with dispassionate blue ink,
Signifying its future lack of suitability to sit on the shelves,
Having been elbowed aside by this and that year’s thing
(And the book had not been checked out since the mid-seventies,
Perhaps some young man all but short-circuited
By the prospect of a bathing Julie Christie,
Or some female counterpart shedding bell-bottomed tears
Over doomed love, which, in her cosmology,
All such things were fated to be)
Placed in some temporary cardboard casket
Which once held bananas or copier paper or ancient time cards,
Sitting cheek to elbow with cookbooks, breathless biorhythm tomes,
Buffeted about forces unseen and beyond its control
As it faces the uncertain and uneasy prospect of possible reclamation.

Man, don’t talk that ****--I ain’t but six-eleven, maybe,
But, pretend as he might, Reggie was seven-foot, legit,
And as bad a cat as ever took the court at Eastern High,
But bad off the court, too, took the neighborhood with him,
Wherever he went--man just couldn’t shake Mack Avenue,
And when the pros just decided
He wasn’t worth the trouble any more,
He had nowhere to go but back home, and nothin’ to work with
Save havin’ a big hand to pull a trigger with
(And that wasn’t getting him too far, like there wasn’t anyone
Who didn’t know who Reggie was),
And at some point you end up on the wrong end of the barrel,
Then nothin’ left to do
‘Cept try to wrestle what remained of the man
Into some huge-*** coffin
(Word was Mike Storen from the Pacers paid for it,
Even though Reggie had threatened to shoot his *** on live TV),
And word was when they got him to the graveyard
The coffin wouldn’t fit in the hole straight-in,
So they had to snap off a couple of the handles
And wedge him in all kitty-corner.
Man, I hope that story’s true,
Folks from the neighborhood used to say,
It wouldn’t be Reggie if he went straight.

Three days, is what the HR rep said, somewhat sheepishly,
As if she was fully aware that boxing up one’s grief
In a span of a few dozen hours
Is a matter of wishful thinking
And certainly she sympathizes
(Indeed, as she speaks,
She spreads her hands in such a way
As you half expect doves to come forth in full flight)
Empathy being their stock in trade,
But the law and the handbook say three days,
And then you need to have your head
******* back on and looking forward.

Eventually, the mail brings fewer envelopes
Marked with embossed flowers
And subdued and tasteful stamps,
The usual flow of solicitous inquiries,
Pre-stamped and pre-sorted,
Inquiring as to your credit needs,
The condition of your windows and siding,
Resumes apace, and more than once,
In fits of inappropriate black humor and frustration,
You scribble, in bold thick strokes of a marker,
The addressee no longer resides at this location.

You return to nine-to-five,
Though your ghosts keep their own hours,
Stopping by to visit on their own schedule alone,
Prompted by the tiniest of things:
The dog scampering to its feet in a hurry,
As if someone was at the door,
The discovery of a long-unused pitching wedge
Standing expectantly in the back of the closet,
A song from long ago which was beloved
When you lived in the pairing mandated by Noah
Before you entered the shadow world of ones and nones.
Sometimes you give into the giddy madness,
And rise to waltz around the room,
Careening about unsteadily, clumsily
As you have yet to completely master
The difference in weight shift and distribution
That is required of a solo act.
The timing of these visitations
Often disrupts your schedule and sleep patterns,
And you think that perhaps tomorrow you’ll call in.

My admonition to my erstwhile business partner,
Delivered in stentorian tones,
Augmented by gnarled, bony finger
And a cacophony of implements of imprisonment,
Was, in truth, primarily theatrical in nature.
Indeed, what leviathan of finance, what learned philosopher,
What nimble-minded barrister or incumbent of a bishopric
Can say precisely at what point
Mankind begins and his commerce ends?
If I was not a wise steward of the currency,
If I did not act in such a manner
To assure a strong and stable rate of return for the honest investor,
Instead letting pound and penny fluctuate
Like waves on the great open Atlantic in a November maelstrom,
Then how many, great and small,
Would be washed away, lemming-like,
By the great tide of fiscal panic?

Perhaps the rationale for my caution to the good Ebenezer
Can be called into question, but none can doubt its effect;
His deeds were lauded, celebrated in story and song,
Although whether that reflected a true change of heart
Or simply the speculative seeking of indulgences
Was never subject to any degree of scrutiny;
Yet I (who, to be fair, played more than a trifling part
In his reclamation and illumination)
Remain fully encumbered
With a hodgepodge of iron and ignominy
For no other reason than a minor disparity in our timing,
That minute degree of light which divides white from gray,
And, as such, I can do no more than ruefully note
How problematic is this business of rehabilitation

It is three, perhaps four, in the morning,
And he is, as is his custom, fully awake
(Slumber not being a restful place,
A habitat of undesirable outcomes, on and off court
Rife with pasts he can neither change nor comprehend)
He is not replaying the evening’s blowout loss
(Thirty-eight points, to be exact;
He always knows the final margin)
A tragicomedy performed
For the benefit of a few dozen disinterested spectators
Who had taken the time to mill about the school’s tiny gym
(Player friends and family, mostly,
Punctuated with a few students stopping to warm up
As they were coming or going from some off-campus gin mill,
Or the odd five-and-six –year old
Running unencumbered through the mostly empty bleachers.)
He is scheming, devising, alchemizing some offensive formula,
The salt shakers double-screening for the wine glass
As he seeks some methodology, some incantation
That will transform his charges
Into a unit capable of implementing his vision.
There had been such a player once,
An extension of that vision, indeed its living embodiment,
Whose feel for the game went beyond mere understanding,
Something inherent, wired into his very being
(But co-existing with other forces else as well,
Something which could not be contained by offensive sets
Nor subject to the dictates
Of what some point guard’s fingers flashed
As he walked the ball over half court;
Like Geppetto’s afflicted creation, he didn’t need any **** strings,
And eventually told the old puppet master
That he could shove the rods up his ***.)
They had, in ways no less painful for their inevitability,
Failed each other irreparably,
So the old man ended up here,
And as he moved coins and condiments
In picks and curls and back-door cuts,
He thinks about how a young assistant told him after one loss,
Well, if you’re going to get your *** kicked,
At least it’s a pretty spot to do it.
He’d almost let the kid have it both barrels, but he let it go,
Figuring the kid would find out the deal soon enough,
That the woods around this place were nothing but darkness
And their only promise to ******* close in on you.

A center stripe on such a road would be no more than affectation,
The prospect of two vehicles on the same stretch of this blacktop
Which ambles from nowhere to nowhere, old logging path
Morphed into a convenience for fishermen or bird watchers
Heading to the odd bits of Adirondack Park land
Scattered higgeldy-piggeldy in its path
All but a mathematical impossibility.
Indeed, the fog lines are barely visible, a series of dots and dashes
Along the crumbling berm of the shoulders,
And the signs testifying to the calamitous curves ahead
Are faded and pock-marked
In testament to generations of pellet-gun marksmanship
And twelve-ounce projectiles.
There remain the odd traces of the byway’s former usefulness:
Rusted blades or unevenly-spoked wheels
Left behind by ancient logging outfits,
The odd abandoned hunting camp, and here and there,
Visible through gaps in thick, ancient stands of pine
(Having outlasted the original settlers and logging concerns
Through the sheer stubborn implacability of biology),
You might see an anomalous abandoned bus up on blocks,
And there are those who have sworn they have seen them
Adorned with curtains in the windows,
But that is most certainly a trick of the light,
A mis-apprehension of something half-glimpsed
By the drivers as they sped by.

It was not, by any means, a loss of faith;
Indeed, her devotion was a boundless, unfettered thing
Beyond proscription, beyond rote chant and catechism,
And what she found as a novitiate
Were shuttered gates and gossipy confessionals,
Standoffish priests, pig-eyed and pinch-lipped
Sisters who thought life’s commerce
No more than mechanical prayer and spotless linens,
The whole enterprise
Smacking of the exclusion of Heaven’s bounty.
So she demurred when the time came to take her orders,
And she returned to the world of pavements and lesser pieties,
Free to seek God on park swings and barstools,
In pleasures of the pastoral and the profane,
Though her faith is no Dionysian walkabout,
As she is passionate to the cusp of maniacal
When it comes to the Book of James’ admonition upon works;
She is often found among the sisters she once tiptoed alongside
At food pantries and clothing drives
(She is scrupulous about ministering to only secular needs,
As the Bishop is not happily disposed towards those
Who choose not to take the veil,
And the specter of excommunication is a prospect
Too awful to contemplate)
Afterwards clambering onto some vaguely roadworthy MTA bus
Back to her studio apartment in Green Island,
Where she often walks down to the Erie Canal lock nearby,
Praying for those who have travelled  near and upon the water,
Convenience store clerks and ragged Irishmen fleeing famine,
Feral kittens and insufficiently mourned mules.

My regiment?  The New York 156th, B Company.
I’d left the farm in the hands of my wife and her uncle
(Polly and I never had children,
Something I’m grateful for now.)
We’d boarded the train in Kingston,
Figuring we’d have a picnic, see the countryside
Fire a few shots at the Rebels and the odd squirrel
And be home before snowfall.
The picnic was spoiled **** quickly, and not by ants;
We took fire within a half-day of meeting up
With the main body of the corps,
And couldn’t get our heads back up until **** near Appomattox.

Truth told, I don’t remember exactly how many men I killed
(And in some cases, “men” stretches  the truth,
As some of them looked like altar boys from the church,
Same age as the sons I’d never had.)
You find after a while it’s best to lose count,
Do what you can to forget faces
(Now that the beds are soft and the fields are quiet,
The faces come back to disturb my nights then and again.)
Fact is, I’m convinced I survived only because I rode down
What was human about me, or at least the good part;
Best to be like cows or some poor **** stupid ox:
Eat what you can where you can,
Sleep when you might have the option,
And, like the other poor dumb bovine *******
Simply waiting for the cudgel,
Don’t let your thoughts stray elsewhere
Until you’re more kin with the animals than anything else
(I remember Tommy Dunbar from over Esopus way
Brought his dog with him;
It marched with us all the way to Pleasant Hill,
And the only time I cried between enlisting and mustering out
Was when that mongrel snuffed it.)
Anyways, that is all over, and good riddance to it;
I’ve no desire to mount up
With the Grand Army of the Republic types
And go wave the ****** shirt in some convention hall in Albany,
Nor am I inclined to meet up with fellow graybeards
From the other side of the line to sleep in tents
And mock-shoot wooden rifles and imaginary minie *****.
It’s over, and I prefer to keep it that way.
Funny thing, the colonels and chaplains always insisted
That God was on our side, and I suspect their boys did the same.
I suspect (though I’d never tell preacher, of course)
That He left the field quite early in the proceedings.

He is, to his way of thinking, the only one wearing shorts;
The nine young men with him, baggy-wearing and body-pierced,
Swoosh-adorned from head to toe,
Sporting something which seem close kin
To blown-up Bermudas or women’s culottes.
Back in the day they would have been laughed right off the courts,
But it is not his day any longer, as he is constantly reminded;
He wears shorts that merit the term, old leather Converse All-Stars
Cracked and faded as the berm of the back roads
In this out-of-the way locale,
A faded and decades-laundered jersey
Bearing the name of a long-defunct auto dealership.
The kids call him “Jumping Toyota.”
Yo, Toyota—no dunkin’ on us tonight, OK?
Hollering and laughing as they dap and jump-and-bump,
Mimicking playground ballers in cities
They have never been within three hundred miles of,
And he smiles in grim resignation,
Knowing he might get a fingertip on the rim on a good day.
His game is strictly cerebral, horizontal now,
The muted, pastel joy of a solid, timely pick
Or well-thrown bounce pass
Has become his vehicle of blacktop epiphany,
And he eases up now and then on the offensive end
To provide succor to tendons and ligaments
Which, in spite of admonitions to himself
That at your age you need to take it easy, *******
Will still register their protests a very few hours from now
Leading to tortured grimaces and the occasional audible grunt,
As he holds his place on the third-shift line at the Alcoa plant
Bringing his co-workers to ask him,
In that hazy place between bemused and stupefied
Man, don’t tell me you’re still playin’ ball?
Once in a while, though, he will still drive hard towards the tin
And, eighteen again for the a snapshot of a moment,
He will stop on a dime and drop a jump shot
Making no noise whatsoever
Save for the whispery snap of the bottom of the net,
Sound every bit the same as it was
Before his knees and ankles went rogue.
Outside the chain-link fence, a young man plugged into his iPod
Bobs his head in time to some unheard song
As he leans in an approximation of nonchalance
Against a great old elm tree
(Branches bedraggled and drooping,
Giving it the air of some old warlock gesturing in mock-menace
Though his wand has gone a-gleaming,
His magic having deserted him as well)
Which bears a large painted orange circle
Signifying its imminent destruction.

She is the living embodiment of the cliché,
The song where the male sub-lead
Returns from some second shift, some third drink
To find she has gone, leaving some scrap-paper note,
Hastily scribbled and wholly incomplete,
Some variation upon Don’t try and find me,
And so she is suitably unfound herself,
As she has given great thought to her froms,
But rather short shrift to her tos,
Finding herself north of the Thruway,
Looking for somewhere to spend the night
(The twin motors of adrenaline and anxiety running on fumes)
Happening upon, as if almost by some beneficent magic,
A Travelodge bordered by an expanse of cornfield
(Long since gone to seed, the stalks bowed and spent,
Waiting for the patently overdue cob harvester)
And after she is checked in and somewhat unpacked
(The bored, bemused woman who slumps about the front desk
Mercifully sparing with the small talk)
The skies, which had been late-October slate blur-gray,
Slightly malevolent but only implicit in their threats,
Open up in a cold and unwelcome drizzle,
And, whys and wherefores being things for a later date,
She runs outside and begins dancing in the parking lot,
Unseen and unremarked upon,
And even though the rain is cold, soaking, grim in portent
(The forecast dourly noting the possibility of wet snow,
Nattering that accumulation is possible at higher elevations.)
She is seemingly unaware and unconcerned
As to the upshot of this drenching,
Any whispers of the two or three other occupants of the motel,
Any judgments passed upon her mad danse pour un,
As she has passed beyond any notion of admonition.

We have the full complement of the requisite barriers:
Barbed wire, barren landscape, unpleasant canines,
Stark metallic towers with vaguely menacing turrets and gunsights
(Though they are remote, poorly lighted,
Perched high enough that I suspect they may be occupied
By mannequins or scarecrows),
And what cannot be attained physically
Is augmented by other means,
Breakfasts at mid-day, bits of bread in the blackest part of night,
Light as dark, dark as light.
We tell our company this and that of the news of the world:
Half–and-quarter-truths, innuendos of some plausibility,
Outright truths as well, but told with the most outrageous leers,
Put forth in a tone which suggest that such things could never be,
(I have come to appreciate Pilate’s question,
For truth is a singular thing,
Valid within the limits of one’s mind,
No more than a lower-case notion
When butting up against those of others),
And I tell myself that this is all something that needs to be done,
That perhaps there is no greater good
Than a certain regularity,a certain order of things,
But I am unsettled by the memory of an episode
Some three days past, where one of this assemblage
(I suspect the person in question was female,
But we keep our band well-shorn, and they are costumed
In rather shapeless and gray tunics
Which, given the lapse of time
And the long intervals between our own re-supply,
Look suspiciously like our own garments)
Look in my direction with what fervor she could muster,
All but barking You! You will be forgiven none of this!
And I was left perplexed by her admonition,
Which, as I began to readying myself for dinner
(Scrubbing my neck, my face, my hands,
Trying to rid myself of the damnable dust
Which is omnipresent, unavoidable, beyond eradication)
Lingered, as I could not for the life of me
Comprehend the calculus which would mark me,
A relative speck, a cog, a mere functionary,
As the one to be singled out.

West Center Street was, not so long ago,
A kaleidoscopic flood come three o’clock:
Children in waves of blues, greens, and golds
Set free from Margiotti Elementary,
The more subdued hues of the men
Finishing first shift, at the Montmorenci Mills
All filling the sidewalk
Like some great jigsaw puzzle in continual motion.
Now, the color seems to have left us for greener pastures,
Only the faded, unevenly washed yellow buses
Which take the children
To the central school over in St. Mary’s remain,
Solemn faces forlornly pressed to the windows
As they pass the ungainly and obsolete building
Now dark and silent, squat and hunched-over,
And further on the mill, gates padlocked,R
rusted pieces of chain-link pointing accusatorily downward,
As if the fault for its closing
Lies with us and us alone.

Ah, but it was different, near enough in time
That the memories remain sharp, clear, biting
And they come back in curious bits and pieces,
Like how the Market Basket stayed open twenty-four hours
So the third-shifters could shop for groceries
Without having to short-change themselves on sleep,
The lights in Carter’s Depatment Store,
Bright as Heaven itself to six-year old eyes
Fixed wonderingly on an electric football game
Or a toy bridge of the Enterprise, complete with a transporter
Which made Spock disappear As Seen on TV,
Or how, when we went to the Friday fish-fry at the Kinzua House,
We would stop at every table,
Fathers exchanging greetings, finishing those jokes
Which the noise along the line had left incomplete.

You left, just like everyone else, but not for good, of course;
It was just a temp job to make some money
Until you’d saved up enough to help out your mom.
Once you got settled, you’d come back home
To visit—by Christmas, at the very latest.
We waited outside of the old Rexall for the Trailways bus
That would take you to Erie,
And after the shortest half-hour I’d ever known
We kissed at the curb and embrace
Until the driver intimated with his horn
That we either needed to say goodbye or get a room.
Still, I knew you’d be back, as, after all
There are bonds that time and distance cannot break.


That is all over now, and those dreams
Our parents clung to like rosaries,
Where our lives were better than what they had known
Have moved south to Charlotte, or Houston, or Birmingham;
The Market Basket closed, boarded and de-windowed;
Hell, you can’t buy a single gallon of milk
Between here and Ridgway,
And the Kinzua House long gone as well,
Save for the tattoo place that occupies the space
Where the bar once was,  
And once in a while, though less so every year,
You’ll catch one of the old-timers, frozen in time,
Staring at the smokestacks of the old mill
Ancient obelisks like those
Looming over the graves of the town’s founders
Tucked away in the old section of the cemetery
Up on Bootjack Hill,
The paths chock-full with weeds and briars,
The grass unmown for some three summers now.

*When I got your card, it was postmarked from Denver;
The temp gig hadn’t lasted as long as it was supposed to,
And it’s not like Erie is a boom town, after all.
Still, you were there long enough to meet someone,
Someone, you noted who was looking ahead,
Not over his shoulder all the **** time;
Besides, you noted in your one
And ultimately failed attempt at humor
You remembered how our Geography teacher had once said
That all the land east of the Missisippi,
Even here in the foothills of the Endless Mountains,
Were simply mounds of dirt, old and dead,
While the Rockies were young, vibrant, still shifting and growing.
The card was one of those that come blank on the inside
So you can compose your own witty epithet,
As there are some sentiments so dreadful in their foolishness
That even Hallmark won’t touch them.

It is not, of course, a literal longing
An actual yearning for some terra firma unlike our own
(The vistas promised her elders
In the pages of children’s science encyclopedias,
Jetson-esque lunar traffic jams and hourly interplanetary shuttles
Failing to materialize as prophesied,
The future being a pastel, underwhelming version of our hopes)
But things unrealized, ethereal but substantial,
Their very lack of corporeality giving them a solidity,
A genuineness that those subjects of everyday aspirations
No longer possess, stripped of all semblance of magic,
And she has made a rather discontented compact with all of that,
Choosing to cast her lot with such that this plane has to offer,
But her memories can be fanciful things,
And not party to such contracts,
And in her mind she is whisked away to the bus ride
To see the cosmos projected on the school planetarium
In the cow-town school up in Poplar Ridge,
Her heart quickening as the darting stars
And the great, ponderous Jupiter
Waxed and waned on the building’s dome,
Her fifth-grade group among the last to see such a show
Before the gears in the works,
Impractical and wildly expensive to replace
Sheared and came to a halt for the final time.

Sing, you said, of the happy path life will take
Of carefree, languid days and party-filled nights,
Of endless summers at our home by the lake,
Of Paris and Milan to take in the sights.
So (my arm around your waist) I tell you this:
Cinderella and Snow White both lived a lie.
There’s no fairy godmother or prince’s kiss,
No carriage ride to some castle in the sky.
I will sing of liverwurst and fairy tales
Of hopelessly clogged sinks and vomiting cats,
Of threadbare lime green carpet and hidden nails,
Of overdue bills and heated, pointless spats
And how a smile from you will make any care
Vanish like the dew into morning’s warm

After so long we have returned
To reclaim all that we once spurned.
We cannot change what might have been;
Come meet me in the cool green glen.

The prudish reserve of our youth
Revealed to us no golden truth
With words writ large by flaming pen;
Come meet me in the cool green glen.

The modesty of childhood days
Has vanished like the morning’s haze
Let us embrace what we feared then;
Come meet me in the cool green glen.

The path of cautious restraint
Now bears the slightly tarnished taint
That falls upon all mortal men.
Come meet me in the cool green glen.

So all our reticence and fear
Has led us once again to here.
Just in time may not come again;
Come meet me in the cool green glen.

There is, I admit, no small attraction in the possession
Of the wand--but invariably that becomes obsession,
For magic bewitches all it touches, and woe to the man
Who, having discerned its methods and secrets, believes he can
Employ it yet stay unfettered and unscathed, without effect,
(As if the mere claim of enchantment would not make one suspect
Both the man and his motives), all sweet fruit without bitter rind.
Such men may find the verdict of peers and gods to be unkind,
(There exists no single point in time we fail to comprehend
That no simple act of wizardry postpones our mortal end)
For who among us remains impervious to Nature’s whims
Or time’s ravages--our concentration wanes, the eyesight dims,
Our hands shake, every bit as unsteady as our convictions.
So we carry on, with our exceptions and contradictions
Expertly hidden, in the hopes that, at least for a short while,
We can offset, through the employment of parlor tricks and guile,
The diminution of our gifts, fading of our faculties.
So, as we reach our denouement, what have our abilities
Brought us in the end, save the knowledge that our reputations,
No matter how great, serve as no match for our limitations?

I had been, through much of my youth,
Under the care and tutelage of my Uncle Virgil,
He being the sole remainder of my father and his brothers,
The rest taken by life’s wind and wuthering,
Anzio and clogged arteries, sneak attacks and suicides.
The final remnant of my patrimony
(But an anomaly among them,
Squat and blocky where his brothers had been all willowy height,
Bestowed a high reedy voice among a half-dozen baritones)
The one entrusted, due to attrition as well as temperament,
With the shepherding of the family farm
Through another generation
(The original design involved my father taking the reins,
But, though he came to the plowed rows, scrubby old apple trees
And lumpy moguls of the place with the hopes and misigivings
Of a soon-to-be- jilted suitor,
He was a dreamer, a man of little to no pragmatism,
Ill-suited to the grinding and unromantic nature
Of cutting dead cows from stanchions
And bringing order to barbed wire,
The mantle then falling to the youngest brother,
But he proved too easily enveloped in life’s minutiae,
And he departed with a locked garage door and idling engine,
The official version being terminal absentmindedness
While giving his antiquarian Buick a tune-up.)

I had come over to help out with the haying,
Its timing, even by small-farm standards,
Subject to Nature’s whims and caprices,
Process needing to be completed in narrow windows of time
When the tall grasses were just-so dry enough to cut,
Requiring marshaling the forces for attack
At a feverish pace before the next thunderstorm
Marched over the hills and ancient glacial moraines,
Leaving ill-timed efforts all for naught
(My contributions to the cause a hit-and-miss thing,
I being my father’s son after all.)
We’d finished up with some daylight to spare,
A thing to be celebrated,
My uncle and I repairing to the porch for beer and small talk.
In the course of ruminations upon things great and small,
I’d mentioned how I’d changed my considerations
On the ostensibly unchanging hillsides,
How they were once foreboding, claustrophobic things,
Walls to be surmounted like some pine-topped Maginot Line,
But now comforting, benign things,
Cradling me gently, almost imperceptibly yet lovingly.
Uncle Virg took a pull from the bottle and slowly shook his head,
What those hills are, boy, is dirt, just a bunch of **** rock
Ground up by the big ice, and it would have been nice
If they’d made a better job of it,
Not that they gave a tinker’s **** about us then or now.
Son, I listen to you talk, and I despair of you.
Why, what would your father say?
He took another drink, then laughed softly.
Oh, hell, never mind. I know what your father would have said,
We drank more or less in silence after that,
The sun making various sherbert pastels
Of reds and oranges and purples,
Though I thought it perhaps for the best
Not to comment upon that particular phenomenon.

We’d dallied with bright shining dreams, of course;
Gatsby-esque timetables and solemn pacts
Made with ourselves, come undone with brute force.
A bitter brew to quaff, but facts are facts;
We’re those workaday cogs we once foreswore
(Of no note at all save in mothers’ hearts)
Doomed to lurch forward while being no more
Than the shabby sum of commonplace parts.

Let us shelve tattered remnants of our ghosts,
And deign not to dwell on what could have been,
At last shaken free of our fathers’ boasts
(Praise God, no longer promising young men.)
Unshackled from that, then we can begin
To embrace the joy of just sleeping in.

We’re the salty dogs of mo-der-ni-ty,
Robot starfish programmed so expertly
(And we’d like to state most em-phat-ic-ly
There’s no cannibalism in the Royal Navy.)

As we sail the blue waters virtually,
There’s a thigh for you and a femur for me
(Just a wee little joke, as you can plainly see;
There’s no cannibalism in the Royal Navy.)

We sing along to Yanni and John Tesh
Though we’d prefer to have them in the flesh
(It’s their haunting tunes we find quite tasty;
There’s no cannibalism in the Royal Navy.)

We serve the nation and prove our worth,
Map the sewers of Brixton, gnaw on Colin Firth
(He treads the boards in-spi-ray-shun-ly;
There’s no cannibalism in the Royal Navy.)

When our duty’s done and the day is through
We have a most proper naval bar-be-cue
(Though we replace officers most fre-quent-ly
There’s no cannibalism in the Royal Navy.)

The bar squats at the bend in the road where Mill becomes Burden,
Walls somewhat recently painted,
Roof re-shingled ostensibly within memory
A derelict stockade on a front line where cowboy and Indian alike
Have each thought better of standing their ground,
Now defended by a few solitary souls,
Veterans of the days when the place hummed with those
Who’d finished shifts at Troy-Bilt or the Freihofer bakery
(Places either long gone or in the hospice stage,
The bar itself not profitable in any sense of the word,
Opening each afternoon for no palpable reason
Save some madness of inertia)
And who had not moved in with children in Latham or Malta,
Or gone to some frowzy, weedy southern trailer park
Sweating and sweltering through ninety-degree dawns
In Sarasota or St. Pete.
One corner of the building still bears a neon sign
Which sternly announces Ladies Entrance
Though, as the resident wits are fond of noting
Ain’t been no lady on the premises ‘n a month of Sundays,
But, on this particular evening, there is one of that gender
Haphazardly arranging herself on a stool
In search of a compromise between physical comfort
And simply remaining somewhat upright.
She is there in the company of a squat, *****-handed man
Who sits beside her, leering and yakking away
As he signals the bored and ancient bartender
For a couple more Buddy long-necks
(She cannot remember his name—Clyde, Clete,
In any case she’ll assign him an identity later.)
Their acquaintance is of a recent nature,
His end of the deal a burger at the diner on First Street
And a drink or two or three here
(There is a return on his investment, implicit and fully understood,
Though she has not—in her mind, anyway—reached such a point
As it needs to spelled out in plain English.)
She clutches, tightly though surreptitiously as possible,
For she occupies a social stratum
Where placing a death grip on something
Marks it as valuable, putting a bulls-eye
On object and owner as well,
A purse, a three-hundred dollar Coach bag
Bestowed on her by some gum-chomping Russell Sage undergrad
In a random, futile, wholly absurd gesture
(This was some time ago, and the bag, once a fiery crimson
Has faded and the fine leather has creased and mottled
Until it now appears to be a miniature strawberry heifer on a strap)
Though she would note that she was a family of some substance,
Having once attended a fine all-girls school
Where she became engaged
To a professor in the Fine Arts department
(It is unclear whether it was Smith or Bryn Mawr
Or, perhaps, Sarah Lawrence, if anywhere at all,
Her suitors and specters
All but indistinguishable from one another.)
All that, however, is clearly a matter of was;
Her will be is a less fanciful thing,
A measured yet inevitable and precipitous slide
into transactions less palatable
Exchanged for comforts colder than such as she settles for now
(But perhaps not—there is a persistent, palpable pain in her side
Accompanied by a noticeable swelling; Probably benign,
The nurse practitioner had noted at the free clinic,
But she occupied that societal niche
Where further, if unheroic, measures
Were unlikely to be forthcoming.)
In any case, she and her paramour pro tempore
Will call it a night, she pinning her bag to her side
As she instinctively swivels her head to and fro
To ensure no one is seeking to relieve her of her prize possession
(Though its contents are meager—a few dollars in change,
A sweater, a change of underwear,
The whole blessedly insubstantial,
As it is likely she could shoulder any additional load.)

Well, the maps were quite ghastly, you know;
We’d assumed the Frogs would have a pleasure cruise,
All baguettes and brioche, up the straits.
We’d no idea the Turks had dug in as they did,
As the spooks and their charts
Revealed sheer cliffs,
Harmless as Dover.
Nor did we fare much better on dry land,
The topographical atlases we had in the field
Might have been compiled by Mercator himself.
The Turks fought quite well;
One gives them a measure of credit for that, one supposes.
Frankly, we’d have been better served
If we’d just waited for the de rigueur internecine slaughter,
What with the ease they’d hacked each other to bits
Over some ancient family squabble or inconsequential tribal matter
(Can you imagine civilized peoples
Fighting to the death over such trivia?)
I suppose such cruelty and boorishness
Should have not been surprising.
They wouldn’t take prisoners, you know;
Just shot our boys *****-nilly,
With no regard whatsoever to honor or military convention,
Though it should have been no surprise
That the swarthy ******* would not play by the rules.

It’s not like her to knock, of course.
She tiptoes in half-apologetically
(Though the notion of her being unwelcome
Has never crossed her mind)
Regardless of the hour, being likely to show up
At any when and where she chooses, not being subject
To any nine-to-five workaday concerns or constraints.
She declines the offer of a drink, demurely shaking her head
(In her world view, a solitary and un-chaperoned lady
Does not drink in the presence of a gentleman)
Though her company leads me to move from beer to whisky
With some alacrity, for the evening’s entertainment
Is comprised, as it invariably is, of home movies
Featuring my inability to live up to my potential,
My compromises, accommodations,
And outright abdication of principle and conviction.
The scenes, familiar if not particularly welcome,
Play out one more time,
Accompanied by the gentle whirr of an aging Super -8
Or the gentle ka-thunk of a carousel projector
(Her taste in my malfeasance is charmingly retro)
And as the montage proceeds with a weary ruthlessness,
I attempt to explain my role
With well-polished used-car-salesman-issue obfuscation
Or a plaintive, childlike tirade
Concerning the indifference of gods and men
And any and all entities in between.
She is unmoved, silently taking it all,
The corners of her mouth a bit askew,
Sitting in the interval between bemusement and scorn.
Eventually, I slump into my chair, fully chastened
(No, more than that—something deeper, more final,
Something even beyond defeat)
And at some point I grunt
How it would be nice if we could, just this one time,
See what the **** was on cable instead.

There were
children, sweethearts
shared Moscows, Odessas;
I told myself Ready, aim but
not fire.

We’d make the journey, Hannibal-esque in nature,
Either on foot (even on the most dogged of the dog days
When the antidiluvian tar on our side street would bubble up,
Causing our sneakers to make a rhythmic flik-wump
Until we reached those byways deemed worthy of asphalt)
Or in ones and twos on our bicycles,
Our locks, assuming we were not the wards of parents
Who were devotees of the shorn-to-the-skull “summer cut”,
Flying unencumbered in the breeze
As we paid occasional fealty to the rules of the road,
Our destination being the “variety store”
Shoe-horned into one of the narrow storefronts
On our unprepossessing main drag,
A cacophony of canned goods
And candy bars of uncertain vintages,
Novelty pens and girlie mags two-thirds obscured
In jerry-built wooden shelves toggled together
By some former paramour of the frowzy divorcee
Serving as empress of this nickel-and-dime principality.
We coughed up our dimes, hoarded and guarded
With the feigned nonchalance of royal Beefeaters,
In the procurement of Cokes, handfuls of Bazooka,
And always but always trim foil packs of baseball cards,
Which we’d unwrap breathlessly, greedily, hungrily,
Hoping our efforts would unearth an Aaron, a Mays, a Clemente,
But usually our reward would be some utility infielder,
Some second-tier relief pitcher or third-string catcher
Cards perniciously reeking of stale gum,
And one particular summer it seemed every pack
Contained the card of Larry ******* Burchart,
Clad in his full Indians uniform,
Smiling at some untarnished future
Just this side of the horizon, fully visible and all but realized.
At some point, we moved beyond banana bikes and baseball cards
(Our attention turning to pursuits more expansive and expensive)
Giving up children’s things and boys’ games and fanciful dreams)
And looking back, it seems that the smile on that baseball card,
(Ubiquitous as cockroaches at the time,
Now mourned for its absence)
Was more than a touch on the wan side,
That apparition in the distance undefined and indeterminate
Malignant in its very uncertainty.

i.

The sky is, as it was the day before and the day before
And countless days before that, impossibly blue,
Wholly unimpeded by the possibility of clouds.
The hiker stops, taking in the moment, the entire tableau:
Clean lines of mesas rising abruptly in the distance,
The tangible, almost corporeal dryness of the air,
A silence so all-encompassing
As to be almost an entity in itself, and he thinks out loud
How the fingerprints of God’s beauty
Are to be found, even on a place like this.  
His guide, who has simply nodded along unconsciously
Like a dog or hula ******* a dashboard to this point,
Hesitates for just  a moment.
Mebbe so, he says with due deliberation,
Although I’d be perfectly content if your God
Was a little more disposed to look favorably upon humidity.

ii.

Well of course the beach is pristine, the cabby barks,
It never stops raining long enough for anyone to set foot on it.
He lectures his fare, visiting Thomas’ ugly, lovely city on business,
Almost non-stop the entire trip to the hotel,
A litany of woe  decrying decades
Of rising damp, unconquerable mold,
Picnics scheduled in fits of near-lunatic optimism
Invariably falling victim to drizzle and outright downpour,
And, just before he pulls to a stop,
The driver opines I’ve seen Heaven in my dreams,
And it’s a sandy place with nary a gutter or downspout in sight.

iii.

The lake, lovely and Y-shaped
(But deep and silent as death itself,
Holding swimmers and fisherman to its bottom
As closely and tightly as dark secrets)
Is just visible in the distance,
And it is not worth a ****, the glaciers which carved it out
Having left ridges and moraines
Making it impossible to reach with pumps and pipes,
No more useful for irrigation
Than a spigot on the side of a farmhouse,
And so they wait,vacillating between patience and despair
For the rain that will no more come today
Than it has not for near a month now,
A drought that no one
In this part of the Finger Lakes has ever seen,
Even old Jess Bower, who had long since seen ninety come and go
(But he was strangely quiet on the subject, a first as all would attest,
Saying simply Can’t tell ‘bout these things, sometimes)
And most nights the heat of August mocks them,
Stirring with thunder and the occasional bit of dry lightning,
But not a shower, not even a spit to go along with it.

iv.

******* Christ, how can you sweat in weather like this,
But he is soaked, layer upon layer, coat to tee shirt,
Having shoveled twelve, maybe sixteen inches of thick, wet flakes
Which have congealed together in great soggy clumps
Like so many forkfuls of badly prepared mashed potatoes,
The kind of snow that clogs streets and causes coronaries
And brings the kids with shovels strutting hopefully door-to-door,
Shovel yer walk for a ten spot, mister.
As he peels down to tightie-whities and turns on the shower,
He thinks to himself, ****, a couple degrees warmer,
This is all rain, and I am on the couch the last coupla hours.

v.

(Back in the farming country, everyone asleep
in spite of the heat and the long dry,
Only a solitary old mutt dozing on the porch steps
Is awakened by the roll of thunder,
The subsequent splatter of huge drops,
Which lead the dog to rise up
And saunter back onto the porch,
The rain upon his fur making him distinctly uncomfortable.)

I recollect the whole thing as clearly as if I had awoke with the sun,
Dispensing with any alarm, fully awake and engaged.
I am on a gurney being wheeled slowly down a hospital hallway
(For it is clear to that workaday hustle and bustle
Is no longer of concern to me)
Which is all silence,
Save for the squeak and bump of my carriage’s wheels
As it crosses from tile to tile,
And the sheet which covers me is seemingly made of gauze,
For I can, as I pass by one to the next,
See clearly inside each of the rooms,
The tableaus being what you might expect in such a place:
A young man and small child
Fluttering about a mother and her newborn,
A middle-aged woman reading aloud
(But softly, almost mechanically)
To an ancient and clearly unheeding man,
Another woman, aged and frail to the point of being insubstantial,
Dabbing at her eyes with a frayed, damp tissue,
Exiting a room as an orderly closes the blinds.
At this point the scenes become incongruous, almost surreal,
As if another director has suddenly assumed control of the film;
There is a room where a Marlowe-esque priest,
All harlequin-outfitted and codpiece-clad,
Bumbles drunkenly about the room,
Banging his censer against the walls as he speaks in tongues.
But just as suddenly the settings become gentle, pastoral:
In one room there are no walls at all,
Only a quiet valley with dirt roads and small streams
And the sound, disembodied but palpable and oddly familiar,
Of bells tolling faintly and melodiously in the distance,
While in the next there is nothing save
A young woman with angels bending over her.
At this point, I have clearly reached my final destination,
And I expect to find a chilly and spartan space,
Harshly lit and sparsely furnished with metallic chairs and tables,
So I am caught unawares for what awaits through the doors:
Light, just light making everything below it a toy world.
The dream abruptly ends, as they are wont to do,
But it seems I found it oddly comforting,
And it is that which makes me so apprehensive.

Our wandering and searching has led us here again,
As April sloughs off winter and takes us by the hand.
(We have had as tutors fishes, birds, and sons of men.)

The long night of our iciness has served to lessen
Quaint faith in schemes and blueprints which mice and gods have planned
Our wandering and searching has led us here again

And in this place and time, pray it’s not beyond our ken
That which truly matters, beyond praise or reprimand
(We have had as tutors fishes, birds, and sons of men.)

Our now has overtaken the reticence of when
Blurring differences between spontaneous and planned;
Our wandering and searching has led us here again

Let God and devil wrestle for the soul of the wren;
Though the very hills may shake, let our conclusions stand.
(We have had as tutors fishes, birds, and sons of men.)

Let callow youth debate free will till time’s end, amen;
We’d have it no other way, we've come to understand.
Our wandering and searching has led us here again
(We have had as tutors fishes, birds, and sons of men.)

It was only gonna be a little three-hour jump
‘Till the barometer bottomed out and the Minnow went bump
But you make chocolate milk when life gives you turds
Ain’t nothin’ like Thurston Howell and The Thirds.

When that sightseeing gig hit a bit of a snag
It stopped that tight trio from bein' everyone's bag
Because, Daddy, those cats are just too cool for words
Ain’t nothin’ like Thurston Howell and The Thirds.

TH III drips with sophistication,
But it don’t stop the man from syncopatin'
They trumpet like elephants ‘n twitter like birds
Ain’t nothin’ like Thurston Howell and The Thirds.

It’s Thurston on the keyboards settin’ the pace
Little Buddy on drums, the Captain on bass
Wowin’ folks drinking coconut shaken-and-stirreds
Ain’t nothin’ like Thurston Howell and The Thirds.

They blow sixteenths and eights and do it in style
Cooler than cats on any charted isle
Keep your Goodman Quintets and your Thundering Herds
Ain’t nothin’ like Thurston Howell and The Thirds.

What sins have we committed, what unpardonable crime
To have brought such desolation to this once fertile plain?
(The only time we’ve ever known has been this burlap time.)

We receive no epiphanies, no glimpse of the sublime;
Just great black walls of dust and grime again and yet again.
What sins have we committed, what unpardonable crime?

The wind and dirt makes madness of our days and our nighttime
For reasons that our governors and preachers can’t explain.
(The only time we’ve ever known has been this burlap time.)

We’ve topped the dead with crosses, covered dead stock with lime.
From whom should we seek redress,to whom do we complain?
What sins have we committed, what unpardonable crime?

And so we’re left this Sisyphean peak to try and climb;
There’s no rainfall to save the crops, no cash to purchase grain
(The only time we’ve ever known has been this burlap time.)

We’ve lost interest in the answers, the reason or the rhyme;
God has, it seems, forsaken us, has forsaken the rain
What sins have we committed, what unpardonable crime?
(The only time we’ve ever known has been this burlap time.)

It was the season when a young man’s fancy
Turns to hunkering down as the land around him locks,
When the envoys of the abyss
Stalk elderly relatives and spindly late-born calves.
He’d happened upon her
At Aubuchon’s Hardware over in Gouverneur,
Picking up bits and bobs to tie up those projects
(The endless caulking, the pitched battles with plaster and lath)
Which had trickled over the spillway of spring and summer
When she more or less materialized,
Like the sudden bloom of some ill-timed crocus
Popping up through fallen leaves.
She’d quizzed him on the merits of levels, cup hooks, and spackles
(The story being she’d leased a gerrymandered third-floor studio
Over the Rent-A-Center on Clinton Street)
They’d chatted in the middle of an aisle for a half-hour or so
When she tittered You know, I could really use a beer about now,
Which became several, then burgers, then his house and bed
Where she settled in for the duration
(She’d had her suitcases in her trunk, and he came to surmise
That an apartment hadn’t been in her plans at all.)
He’d learned about her what little she chose to share:
A nut allergy, a borderline prodigal capacity for whiskey,
Certain boudoir practices and positions,
But her whos, whats and wherefores an admixture
Of carefully chosen quarter-truths and outright fictions;
He’d noticed, inadvertently,
That she had a half-dozen driver’s licenses in her purse,
And she’d been furiously tight-lipped
About where’d she been and come from,
Save one drunken mention of how she’d lived down near Ithaca
Just long enough to stand on the very precipice
Of one of the town’s plethora of gorges
Before deciding not to go headlong over the edge,
‘S no real point, she demurred,
In anything that puts a period on sumpin’.

There was no question of some Snow White happily-ever-after;
She melted away as abruptly as she’d arrived,
Leaving on an implausibly warm late-February day,
A deceit of sunshine and southerly breezes
Which belied the month-plus of hard slog ahead.
He’d cherished no illusions
Of going after her, of tracking her down:
There was small chance she’d given him her real name,
Assuming she knew it at this point,
And she’d changed her cell number in a matter of hours.
He’d done his best to simply chalk it up as a lesson learned
Or a hell of a hell of a story to share with the boys at Nina’s Hotel,
But she had become (or, rather, the notion of
What she might have become,
As all faithless acts require acquiescence to the existence of faith)
A giant hogweed in his very sinews, invasive and implacable,
All but impervious to destruction and subsequent reclamation,
And the throes of her remained as confabulations
In his mind and heart and groin
All through what turned out to be
The longest of long North Country winters,
With flurry and sleet enjoying dominion over new blooms
Until well into the middle of May.

I do not know that man, but he looks like an enemy of the people.
Not the strangest of strange assertions
I had ever heard uttered in these sessions,
And normally I may not have even looked up
To identify the speaker,
But as the voice belonged to a woman,
I chanced to raise eyes upward
Just in time to see an arm fully extended,
An accusing finger pointed at myself.
Understand, I had seen more than one of my peers
Dragged from these chambers
Without regard for decorum or ceremony,
And, in a state which was at least close kin to panic,
I saw visions of myself whisked away to a fetid Butyrka cell
Or thrown, bound and gagged, onto some Siberia-bound cattle car
When I heard a voice something like my own spit out
I do not know that woman, but she looks like a ******* to me.
My accuser blanched and sat down
To a chorus of catcalls and derisive whistling,
And one or two deputies in possession
Of sufficient power or powerful friends
Actually waved handfuls of rubles in her direction.
It may not have been grace under pressure,
But there are situations where chivalry
Is more indulgent than admirable.

The acquisition of a son
With an adequate corporeality, albeit with certain caveats,
Certain limitations in terms of progeny and posterity,
Had awaken something in the old man,
Certain forces leading him to the altar
And, subsequently, to the nursery once more
(A second son, brought to bear in the established manner.
With a minimum of drama and fanfare.)
The child was loved, in a rudimentary fashion;
While his flesh-and-blood bona fides were beyond question,
He was a consumer, a thing of constant need
More akin to a hardship than his celebrated half-sibling,
Whose command of the spotlight
Served as a gravitational pull for parental affections.

The old man passed on after a spell,
Hanging on long enough for his second son
To stumble onto the precipice of adulthood
(His mother had hot-footed it out
Almost immediately after the burial,
Choosing to stage-mother her feted stepchild)
Though his fatherly wisdom
Was limited to matters of his craft, his business,
Which was left to the young man, though grudgingly at that,
As a sop, a means of getting shet of two unwanted encumbrances.
He’d proved to have much of the old man’s gift,
Whittling and carving puppets and toys and dolls
(Though with a certain grim fury making it evident to all
That the work was not a labor of love)
Rarely stopping to speak to or even acknowledge his clientele,
Except if one of them happened to repeat the time-worn chestnut
That the toy chooses the child, in which case he laughed harshly,
All but barking It’s the purse that closes the deal, not the ****,
And then he would return to carving some doll or marionette,
Which would always seem to have a certain wan look
Around the corners of the eyes, the edge of the lips,
The look of a child’s toy equipped with the foreknowledge
That it was destined for the back of some closet shelf,
The bottom of some attic-bound chest.

In fact, they will, at certain times in certain locales, toil or spin,
For sometimes the exigencies of the gray and workaday world
Are immune to the notion that there exist rare entities
Which should be simply allowed to be beautiful,
No more and no less—still, how remarkable it is that,
Whether they be grown in fertile, well-tended soil
Or in a ***** dump chock-a-block with used condoms
And the unfortunate by-products of unhappy liaisons,
They bloom nonetheless; indeed, once they are cut
And arranged just so, the man who tends the vase
Would be wise to remain somewhat circumspect
As to their origin and pedigree.

There are the mysteries of life, those of faith
(Leastwise according to Pastor, though I suspect
That is the get out of jail free card one acquires
By standing upright in the pulpit)
But death is a pretty clear-cut thing,
Going about its business all methodically,
Like a combine up one row and down the other,
And even if it’s a sudden thing,
(Folks coming up to you at the wake in some relative’s parlor,
Patting you on the forearm, absently, mechanically,
Purring At least he went quickly, dear)
It’s all down to any number of things,
Small, unobserved, nothing you’d notice at the time,
Like geese, one here and two there,
Flying to no place in particular
Until they darken the sky with their huge V;
Why, even when old Kuzitski the junkman
Ran his truck off the road up off the Hancock Road
And burned himself up all to hell,
That had been stalking him for days, years,
Maybe from birth.

Every once in a while, I will run into one of the girls from school
(Only on occasion, mind you--I suspect most of them
Go out of their way to avoid me, as where my life has led
Is a strange, almost monstrous thing to them)
And most often there is just idle chit-chat
About how dry the weather has been,
And how they opened a new Jamesway over in Walton,
But if there is someone who occupied that niche
Of best-friend or something akin to that,
Someone who shared sleep-overs and cigarettes,
They will ask me (quietly, almost conspiratorially)
How my newly minted singularity is a blessing in disguise,
Saying breezily Why, just think of what you can do now…
Trailing off to nowhere when they see the toddler
Wound around my legs, and then they understand
The weight of motherhood, of mortgages and monthly notices,
The unrelenting gravity of the whole thing.
(When you have buried a husband,
A good man who was the only port in a storm
When what passes for fun, Adam and Eve’s knowledge,
Goes all pear-shaped on you;
You get a goodly glimpse of what is and is not.)
Other girls I graduated with have gone further ,
Broadening themselves, as some maiden aunt would say;
They float back into town come Thanksgiving and Christmas,
On break from the teachers’ colleges at Cortland or New Paltz,
And I can hear them breathlessly nattering on
About all they’ve learned on evaluating children,
Standard-testing and psychology-textbook regurgitation,
And it is all I can do not to spit,
Not to turn on them and yell
You do not know the first **** thing about any **** thing,
But I let it pass--they will find out plenty soon enough,
It will find them all in its own time.

She brushed her veil aside and tilted her head upward,
Not seeking comfort or benediction,
Only to confirm what she **** well knew was happening,
That the skies, full of gray and grim portent if not outright malice,
Had picked this very time to begin steadily dripping,
Signaling what was sure to be a sodden downpour
(The weekend already chock-a-block with disasters:
The chocolate fountain a testament to dysfunction,
The rehearsal dinner poached salmon overdone and dry
The limousine company downsizing them at the last minute,
Having realized their top-line models
Could never handle the grade or narrow figure-eight drive
Up to the mansion’s precarious hilltop locale.)
The photographer, who’d lived around here all his days
And had developed a sixth sense
Concerning the vagaries of the weather
As well as those of combustible brides,
Had done his best to border-collie the proceedings along,
But as the droplets increased in size and intensity
Recriminations were hurled and doors slammed
As the bridal party sulked off
Toward what promised to be a most interesting reception.

We’d witnessed the goings on,
(Bride fulminating, groom supplicating
The location for the pictures apparently his idea,
Thus proving there are places
Where angels and husbands should fear to tread)
From a safe distance, under the overhang of the great porch
Overlooking the broad, ostensibly placid Hudson below,
Having come here in spite of the clouds,
As the odd rumble of thunder,
And occasional spate of rain being part and parcel of things,
As we’d mucked through these parts long enough to know
That they were fleeting,
And not without compensations of their own
If one was of a mind to seek them out
(We knew full well of the bewitchment
Of seeing the clouds descend slowly,
Covering the sleeping silhouette of old Rip Van Winkle
Slumbering in the knobby Catskill foothills just to the southeast)
And no more than fifteen minutes
After the newly minted man and wife left,
The sun broke through, glorious and unfiltered,
And we ducked into the great room of the house,
Reveling in the magic of unaugmented light.

One quickly learns to fall and roll,
(The pratfall is his stock in trade)
But hard surfaces take their toll,
Although the fall’s expertly played.
He’s just the universe’s tool
Grinning though his blood may boil
A well-placed and convenient fool
(The harlequin’s the perfect foil.)
The passing years have not been kind
(His back is shot, his knees are spent)
But still he keeps the thought in mind
That other wounds are permanent
(He may never bring the house down,
But no one persecutes a clown.)

She simply rolls her eyes and shakes her head
If, on one those rare occasions she is socializing
With social as opposed to business acquaintances
(Daylight hours with single women,
Naturally of a certain laissez-faire outlook as to certain businesses)
Someone brings up the notion of the ****** with the heart of gold;
You do not, speaking in a voice
Residing in the interval
Between a purr and a growl,
Get into the game for the purpose of ministry.
Indeed, she will note
Half-jokingly, half-ruefully,
That the major difference between her job a
And those working the third shift
At the Kendall refinery was the differing nuances
In future health-related consequences.

She is, for a businesswoman,
Possessed of a significant number of quirks,
Having no interest whatsovever
In the abnormal or unduly physically challenging,
Despite the higher potential renumeration
(Honey, you’ll never have enough money for that,
She will demur if the horse-trading turns to such specialty items)
Nor will she engage in congress or commerce
With the upper- management types
From the city’s few prosperous terms
(For reasons she will not nor likely cannot explain)
And she is notably fond,
Possibly to the point of lunacy,
Of lacing her small talk
With scripture and bon mots;  
Indeed, one wall of the men’s room at the Zippo factory
Is devoted solely to various quotes and scraps of verse
She has uttered to her patrons
Who punch the clock at the plant,
And more than one of the boys has said
She’s a pretty **** good piece, even at her age,
But sometimes you wish to Christ
She’d just lay there and be quiet.

It was not impossible that she could have taken another direction,
0r, at least, worked her chosen field on a slightly different plane;
She had been, in her prime, quite stunning
And in possession of both a quick wit and certain presence
That would have nicely augmented the arm
Of those who lived in the rarified strata
(Or at least as high-falutin
As one can be in a small oil-boom town)
Who possessed a combination of money, prestige,
And the inside knowledge that rules and sacred vows
Applied only to sheep and losers.
She chose (a clear and conscious choice, no doubt as to that)
To cast her lot with a humbler set;
The foreman, the mechanic, the assembler on the line
The stooped and gentle florist
Whose sole payment to her was a lifetime of free arrangements
From his small store on Bon Air Avenue
(I tried to lock him into
The floral tribute at my funeral, she once said,
But he seemed to think that would be inappropriate.)

No one, even those in her very small circle of friends,
Seemed to know why she had spurned
The easier road of the demi-acceptable courtesan;
She had given no indication that she saw herself
As some slightly tarnished saint,
One of those so-called angels with ***** faces
(Indeed, she had often made a point of saying
There was no good to be done in her particular line of work),
And she was not forthcoming about her curriculum vitae,
Although it was common knowledge
She was raised a strict Catholic,
And it was said she had a brother
Who was in the care of the state,
Though it was an open question  
As to whether that was in the medium security pen at Foster Brook
Or the bughouse in Kane.  
In any case, as she was want to say
A ***** is the last person you ask
To find the answers to the mysteries of the universe,
After which she would launch
Into a story about how Father Mulligan,
The blustery, movie-Irish priest of her youth,
Was known to be the absolute biggest cheater
To ever set a pair of spikes
Onto the greens at the Bradford Country Club,
Or how the gangster Legs Diamond,
Who would just as soon shoot you as to look at you,
Was known to be the most generous tipper
Ever to patronize the once-grand hotel in Albany
Where her maiden aunt had been,
Once upon a time, a cocktail waitress.

There is, or so I am told, a debate raging
In fashionable rooms and the halls of government
Which concerns snowflakes: specifically, whether each one
Is of a unique and heretofore unknown shape and formation,
Or whether God sees fit to send down identical reproductions,
Like so many Wilton Diptychs being flogged at market.
I have, on the odd occasion, have seen the snow
As it piles up in billowing waves or lumpy bluffs
In the Alps and the Pyrenees,
And, although I lack such learning
Sufficient to dispute the notion of their individuality,
I can say that, in collections of the thousands or millions,
They are indistinguishable from one another,
And, I suspect, all of their like that has come before.

Like so many of her age, barely beyond the blush of childhood,
My poor sister saw her world in stark colorations;
Thunderclouds of black, endless sunbeams of white,
With no room in her orbit’s spectrum for anything in between
(Sadly, she left this life before she could learn to embrace
The beauty to be found in fine raiments of beige, gray, and taupe).
I have buried siblings, buried husbands and lovers,
Buried memories and mistakes,
And in the endless cycle of embrace and bereavement
I have learned of life
That it is the process of accommodation and compromise,
And that it is only dark, austere death
That refuses to give itself unto the joys of negotiation.

It has lately come to pass that the wretched and lovelorn have,
Seeing no way out of their particular predicament,
Began writing my long-dead sister letters
Asking for her advice, indeed her blessing.
Can you imagine such a thing?
The postmaster of Thurn and Taxis (a very old and dear friend)
Has taken to bringing me some of these abjectly weepy epistles.
I’ve long since stopped reading them, of course;
They sing no new song, tread no new ground.
I simply feed them to a good strong fire,
As anyone seeking the aid of a dead young girl
Has already passed beyond the refuge of last resort.

Live in the moment*, we exhort ourselves as well as others,
But such a mandate is a fool’s errand, nothing more,
For all which we endeavor, all we savor and regret,
Are transitory things, snatches of synapse,
Fireflies gone a-gleaming before we can fasten the cap,
All Chinese-checkerboarded with air holes, onto the jar.
So forgive me, then, for not extolling the virtues
Of your laugh, your smile, a certain set of jaw or wrinkle of nose,
For those are fleeting morsels of time,
Mere snapshots, flat and obsolete at the click of the shutter,
Like the crimson-iris inducing Instamatic images of long ago.
Rather let me, then, dwell
Upon the aftermath of these glimmers in time, in your eyes
Those crevices of memory and apprehension
Where the momentary acquires its shading and gradation,
Its context and concreteness, its niche in ones cosmology
Of those things which flutter the surface
Of somnambulant ponds of sleep,
Roiling the stuff of our dreams for better or for worse.

Its color sat somewhere on the spectrum between brown and gray
(Such things being dependent on vagaries of the light,
And the perspective of the beholder)
And it served as a testament
To the muted benefits of near adequacy,
Being too thin for the portentous winds of December,
And too warm for the capricious sunshine of May,
Its threadbare functionality emblematic of its owner,
Whose relationship with those around him
(Indeed mankind and his universe in general)
Vacillated between an affronted indifference
And an implacable if somewhat muted contempt,
His commerce with his fellow man,
Excepting that required to provide him
With the basics of sustenance and shelter,
Carried on in an epistolary fashion,
Through letters he wrote,
Sometimes to those he encountered on a daily basis,
More often to mankind and the unheeding cosmos in general,
Which were stuffed higgledy-piggledy into his coat pockets.
These missives were not humdrum laundry lists
Of those slights and injuries, be they petty or mortal,
But rather soaring and high-flown in nature and tone,
More kin of the sermon than the scolding,
Celebrations of life’s splendors great and small,
More often than not those he knew little or nothing of first-hand.
He’d no intention of sharing these dispatches
With the world at large or anyone in particular;
He’d simply empty his pockets once they were full enough
To present an inconvenience,
And he’d laundered any number of them
On more than one occasion,
And when he’d passed behind this earthly veil,
All but unnoticed and unmourned,
His landlady had simply emptied the contents of the coat's pockets
And consigned them to the trash,
Believing the garment barely fit for charitable purposes
Washed and given a goodly airing out,
Let alone burdened with the detritus of another man’s life.

She is lying on her side, propped up on one elbow
(Her visits are infrequent, always unannounced,
But welcome all the same, more or less)
Affecting a smile which is as adorable as it is inscrutable,
Abed with but not quite next to me,
As she insists on a bundling board between us
(Not due to any chaste modesty on her part, God knows,
But, as she says in her best Blossom Dearie sing-song,
I don’t bestow my favors on just anyone.)
She floats back to this plane of consciousness
From some reverie, some flight of fancy
Her gestures and expressions
Reflect the practiced repertoire of the veteran actress.
Tell me a story, she exhorts
(I have asked her in the past why she never regales me with a tale,
To which she fixes me with a nearly benign
And wholly silent smile.)
And so, having received my marching orders, I proceed.

We knew these guys, I began
(Thus signaling yet another tale
Residing firmly in the once-upon-a-time camp)
Who moved off campus to an old house near Analomink.
A shambling old thing
Which had been added-to and cobbled-together
To the point of an adequate habitability,
(Not that the code inspector could find the place,
Let alone bother with it)
Providing shelter from the elements
As well as the occasionally inconvenient
In loco parentis  of Residential Life,
Leaving them to certain extra-legal proclivities
In the consumption and manufacture of sundry consumables
(The back yard was a warren of copper kettles, tubing, and wire
And the word was they made their own acid in a back bathroom)
Their Merry Prankster-esque weekend excursions
From campus to liquor store to homestead,
Carried out in various states of impairment
And general disrepair of the central nervous system,
Becoming the stuff of legends and let-me-tell-you this tales,
As these were heady, open-ended days,
Mortality being a thing for hundred-level classes
In Norse mythology and cellular biology,
But one time the boys made one of those Saturday night decisions
To combine microdots and cross-country skiing,
And one of them, known to all and sundry as Mad Jack
(Georgia-bred and majoring in academic probation,
His undergraduate career a reverse Sherman’s march northward
From one undistinguished institution to another;
He’d left us shortly thereafter
For some state school just below the Canadian border)
Had failed to show back at the house.
There was frantic, perplexed debate what to do next;
Surely the authorities should be notified,
But that would require an on-site presence of the gendarmerie,
With the subsequent prospect
Of dismissal and possible confinement.
Sunday afternoon came, all whistling freezing rain and wind,
And, just as they were ready to lift the receiver and gravely dial,
Jack burst in the doorway, grinning and chirping madly
About how he’d hooked up with a townie divorcee in Stroudsburg
Dude, you’re full of **** and covered in mud,
One of his roomies stammered,
But Mad Jack simply chattered on, saying that her boyfriend
Had showed up unexpectedly,
And that he’d had to beat it through a window
Standing half-dressed in the cold for a couple of hours
While they’d argued loudly and then equally loudly made up.
Hell of a night, huh boys?,
And then Jack laughed the laugh of the living,
******, isn’t someone gonna get me a beer?

So whatever became of all your friends?, my companion asks me
I shrug my shoulders, empty palms extending upward
As if expecting someone to toss a quarter
Or some other alms my way.
Don’t know for the most part.  Jobs, marriages, life its ownself.
She fixes me with the better part of a pout,
Not much of an answer, is it?
I have very little to say for myself at this point,
Save to offer up another little shrug,
And she says Well, we do what we can with what we have,
And before I can ask her what she means by that,
She has turned away from me and burrowed into the sheets,
All but indistinguishable from the covers themselves.

Even if he was not recognizable in an instant
(As who is he was—no, is—and what he has done
Has only deepened in impact and import over time)
There is still the bearing, the certain set of the jaw,
Clearly marking him as someone
Who has achieved something, has been something,
His ease in this space, seemingly unperturbed
By the setting, the crowd, the donning of the pinstripes
(Though consciously wearing them a bit loose,
The modern fabrics not as becoming to one of a certain age)
Is betrayed, just slightly, by the manner in which
He scoops some dirt from the mound;
There is just the touch of a frantic archaeology in his movements,
As if he is seeking to unearth some relic,
Some talisman providing protection and preservation ,
Or perhaps it is simply the recognition
Of how inextricable the bond is
Between this small patch of ground and his very being,
Its utter annihilation unthinkable, unspeakable to him,
Though this bit of earth is, on its face,
No different from that found on the basepaths
At some ball field off the Fordham Road,
Or the small circles of dirt surrounding the trees
Hard by the new stadium (their existence a conditional thing,
Dependent on the  ongoing haggling
Between green space and parking spots),
Clinging to their green leaves for a few more days
Before their brief explosion of brilliance
Which are the harbingers of cold November.

Ain't much

separatin'

junkies and geniuses.

Still, dude hit pavement right on the

downbeat.

I am often asked, as the inn goes quiet
Where is the dignity in a life anchored
By the brothel, the public house’s riot.
I note—politely—the base of the tankard
Provides a grand, if somewhat modulated,
Viewing of the so-called unexamined life,
A happy one not discombobulated
By the constant nattering of priest or wife.
It’s not—far from it!—that my heart is not stirred
By valiant men performing their valiant deeds,
But the urge to take up arms remains deterred
By the image of a knight face down in weeds,
And my heart’s overruled by the misgiving
That the stuff of legend precludes the living.