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 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.

Well, why not me, I reasoned
(No surprise to friends and loved ones,
As I have always considered my time
On this spinning patch of rock
As something of a monument to the value of pragmatism)
But there were still the normal sine-wave vacillation
Between tenuous optimism and odds-driven grim reality,
Fanciful discussions of Chinese herbs and Mexican clinics
And, later still, of time frames and stock transfers,
All the while various folks attired in suits and clinic coats
Debating matters pertaining to the coda of my personal symphony
(Doing so as if yours truly wasn’t even in the room)
Until, deciding my input might be somewhat pertinent, I said
If it’s all the same to you, I would like to go home.

It was, in a sense, like getting back on an old Schwinn
(Fender dented, rubbing on the front tire just the least little bit,
The chain needing oil, grudgingly giving in
To the demands of the crank)
Sitting, unused but inordinately patient, next to the barn,
The whole notion of settling back into a pace you’d forgotten,
Like dialing back a metronome from allegro to andante
Without missing a beat or flubbing a note.
What’s more, there were the sensations you’d never made time for
While under the thumb of daily deadlines and train schedules,
Greeting you like friends you hadn’t seen for twenty years
But started gabbing with as easy as slipping on old jeans:
The scent of the lilacs, overpowering but borderline mystical,
The informal yet precise ballet of the cattails and jewelweed,
The fields of cows that, even though you know it can’t be the case,
Are populated by the same Bessie and Bossie
You taunted and pelted with watermelon as a child
(I have made it a point to proffer my apologies),
The dark, pine-choked hills,
Formidable but accessible, even comforting.
Sometimes, when I am not paying attention,
I catch myself all but tearing up,
And I say to myself, ever so softly,
As not to disturb the squirrels and the wrens,
I had almost forgotten.  Christ forgive me,
I had almost forgotten.


I’d assumed (sometimes, I can be astounded
At the full extent of my own foolishness)
That she would merely take a leave of absence;
She has, after all, an alphabet full of advanced degrees,
A rainmaker’s reputation and the billable hours to match.
Columbia and Harvard Law, after all,
But she grew up down the road just a piece in Ebensburg,
So this is all part and parcel of her as well
Hard coded in the DNA for better or worse, she’ll say,
All the while shaking her head and laughing softly.
Surely you don’t want to stay here, I’ll say,
Boorishly rational in the face of everything
Which would argue to be otherwise,
You’ve read enough Forbes and Fortune;
Altoona is dead, Johnstown is dying,
And she allows that, for a time, coming back
Was the source of some misapprehension on her part,
Until it dawned on her that on those rare occasions
It had occurred to her to glance skyward in mid-town,
She had seen faceless tiles of windows
Sufficient to sheet a Great Pyramid,
An Armageddon’s worth of angels and gargoyles in the cornices,
But she had not, even once, ever seen the stars.

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.

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.

(I hate poets.
They annoy me deeply.)

I.

There are the balladeers,
Working in service of their inner Service,
(Though, despite the seeming impossibility,
Their hackneyed verse is even worse)
Creating tortuous rhyme
Which slows down labyrinthine narratives
Ending up in some deus ex machine
So implausible that it would make Euripides blush
(Most often courtesy of some unforeseen projectile
Or sudden viral contagion;
Would that their creators meet such a fate!)

II.

I come not to praise the so-called sonneteers,
But to bury them.
They are an earnest lot,
(Lord knows that they are earnest)
And they will make their fourteen lines rhyme
(Though sometimes the rhyme scheme screams for mercy)
And hang the cost.
Though their narratives are head-scratching things,
And their iambs proceed with the steadiness
Of a nonagenarian church pianist
Doing her damndest to fight the wedding march to a draw,
They are content, nay, proud of their work
Because babble rhymes with Scrabble
(Though they are not particularly proficient with the latter,
They have the former down to an art.)

III.

Let us not forget the Buk-zombies,
Those apostles of aphorism,
Most of whom speak of their departed deity
As if he were an old drinking buddy
(Never mind that most of them were two or three
Or perhaps not even a bad idea
In the back seat of some mom’s Buick
When he exited this mortal plane, stage left, even.)
One’s mind is boggled whilst considering
The expanse of the bar required to accommodate
Everyone who would like to
(Or worse, have claimed to)
Buy old Charlie a beer, not that he’d stand for a round.
They are a sullen horde, this lot,
Best dealt with by aiming for the base of the skull.

IV.
Ah, the confessionals, Lord have mercy upon their souls
(For they shall have none upon ours.)
They feel so many things so deeply
As such things have never been felt before
(They have not read their Sexton, their Snodgrass,
Their Lowell, their Pl--well, no,
They have all read their Plath.)
It is, from the moment they arise in the morning
Until such time they set aside their fears and let sleep take them,
All too much for them,
And they bravely face the days
Until such time they care bear to take action
And fling themselves from some convenient precipice.
We should, as a service to them and ourselves,
Ensure the soles of their shoes
Are sufficiently worn and slippery.

(I hate poets.
They annoy me deeply.)

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.

I am the Lorax, who once spoke for the trees
In the hope of bringing progress to its knees
But now I have grown somewhat older and tired,
My outlook and thought process being rewired
(Sometimes to see forest, you must clear the trees.)

Examine the case of the Brown Bar-ba-loots
Whose interests for so long I worked in cahoots.
Could such timid beasts truly thrive in the wild
So innocent, trusting, submissive, and mild?
(My former assertions I strongly refute.)

Why, see how they frolic and scamper in zoos;
How can one watch them and steadfastly refuse
To see how much better their lot is today
As joy for our children as opposed to prey
(A happy condition where no one can lose.)

Ah, scoff the nihilists, but Truffula Trees,
Those havens for birds and those homes for the bees.
Why, what do you say now that they are all gone,
Removed to make way for some suburban lawn?
(These angry young men—O Lord, take them all please!)

I gently remind them it’s just nature’s way,
That some species go while other ones stay,
The carrier pigeon’s no longer alive
Yet somehow we manage to live—indeed, thrive!
(In the face of brute logic, they’ve little to say.)

So don’t be dismayed or frightened or leery
Of doomsday projections outlined by theory
Suggesting that our time on this earth may be done;
Consider the caged Bar-ba-loot having fun
(And we hear fish do quite well in Lake Erie.)

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.

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.

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.

Not much happens in these parts, he would demur,
As if he’d be asked in the first place,
He one of the dwindling few remaining in this dwindling town.
Nevertheless, he has seen his share in four score and change years
From the vantage point of his place
Which sits just off the corner of the Penoyer Road:
Boom times and bust,
Snowdrifts threatening to lick the roof lines of houses,
Boys running through the embers of fallen leaves,
Shirtless and barefoot on improbably warm October days,
Young men in hay wagons and rattle-*** Chevy pickups
Laughing and singing, confident and carefree,
Making their way to the old train depot down at Apulia Station
First step on their way to show the jerries or the VC
Exactly how Upstate farm boys took care of business,
Windows adorned by placards with a gold star
Illuminated by a solitary light bulb at odd hours.
Here and there, younger types have begun to dot the landscape:
Professors with a romantic hankering to get back to the land,
Neo-hippies with their own reasons for embracing the rural life,
Each in their tune walking about their yards
Holding keyboarded and wi-fied replicas
Of that which Moses carried down the mountain,
Their fixer-uppers or double-wides adorned with small dishes
Pointed forlornly at the horizon in search of some satellite supplication.
While he has seen enough not to be too ******* sure about things,
He suspects that complexity and contentment
Rarely walk hand-in-hand,
So he keeps his needs simple enough
To be met by the ancient radio
(Huge, wood-cabineted shambling thing,
More attuned for Amos and Andy than All Things Considered)
The three-checkout grocery in Tully,
The Morton-building sheltered family practice over in Cazenovia
(The squalid, sooty skyline of Syracuse,
Split by six lanes of high-octane madness,
As remote and slightly terrifying to him as Mars itself)
As he has learned enough from thickets of trees
Which all but shriek with torrents of crows in September dusks,
The subtle changes of stream banks
Tinged by the stubbornness of frost on early May mornings
Or blanketed by the pig-iron forge heat of July afternoons,
To know that there are sufficient and possibly necessary limits
To the places where two legs or four wheels can carry a body.

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.

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.

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.

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’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.

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.)

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.

We’d known him, back in the day
At dear old Millard Fillmore Elementary,
As Three-Desks Tommy, highly imaginative monicker
Deriving from his decidedly unimaginative first name
And the fact that he, indeed, had three desks,
Each of them stuffed chock-full
With uncounted numbers of pencils and erasers,
Any number of homework papers
(Usually A’s and A-pluses,
Though there were the odd B’s and B-minuses as well,
As he was a bright, in fact inordinately bright, child,
But sometimes given to sloppiness and stray pencil marks
And a predilection for not reading the directions completely)
Eerily accurate renditions of dinosaurs,
Wildly inventive stories featuring rainbow-hued dragons,
Noble and voluble talking bovines,
And knights and knaves of every size, shape, and suzerain,
Stories which resided cheek-to-jowl with some bit of uneaten sandwich
Until such time it made its existence
Abundantly clear to the custodial staff.
We’d never stopped to think much about his miniature Maginot Line;
It was what Tommy did and had always done
For as long as we could remember,
Though there were some teachers and an assistant principal or two
Who thought the whole thing was permissive bordering on coddling
(His teacher was a veteran of the wars, and well-insulated by tenure,
But she had grown weary of over-glasses glares and snide asides
When Tommy’s name came up in the staff room,
A death by a thousand cuts and all that),
And one day, while moving one of his desks
To clear space for Simon Says,
It had caught on a sticky spot,
Overturning onto a soon-to-be-fractured toe.
When he came back to school, accompanied by an ungainly cast
And an equally ungainly pair of crutches, his teacher took him aside.
Tommy, she purred, Maybe someone is trying to tell you something.
The other kids all make due with one desk,
And I’m sure you can find a way to as well, don’t you, Tommy?
So Tommy embarked on a great cleansing of his little fiefdom,
Filling several garbage cans with his collected works,
(Math papers and mastodons, bologna and Brobdingnagians)
And afterward he’d kept himself to one standard desk,
Duly filing, returning, and circular-filing his paperwork
As the occasion demanded
(Though one time Murph Dunkirk
Asked Three-Desks if he minded downsizing;
Tommy just shrugged, and said Well, it’s better than a broken foot)
And maybe in his dreams he had a thousand desks,
A thousand tops to fling open,
A thousand repositories for light and legend
Or perhaps he never gave it so much as a second thought,
No way to know now, one supposes,
Though if anything out of the ordinary had come his way,
We would’ve probably heard.

The song played-- muffled, hesitant,
As if the tabletop jukebox
Seemed unsure of the tune’s suitability,
As out of place and time as ourselves,
It being Wednesday morning three A.M.
At the all-night diner on the Klondike Road
(The mills, going full-bore down the road in Montmorenci Falls
Making such a place viable, indeed necessary),
But we laughed loudly and nonchalantly
Between bites of nearly adequate cheeseburger,
Ostensibly unaware of all those inevitabilities
Which were tangible but unspoken, indeed unspeakable,
This being the last of the last summer not careworn,
Textbooks to be exchanged for neckties,
Plastic sandals swapped for sensible flats,
Other lives to take flight in other places,
A mere handful of evenings remaining
Before the clumsy process of untying
All that which had been loose ends from the beginning.

Would I go back?  In a sense, it does not matter.
There was always a laundry list of reasons
That it could not be, cannot be, will not be:
Irreparably meshed gears of relocations and reconciliations,
Gordian knots of logic and desire.
Still, in my dreams, I often run like a madman,
Chest burning as my sneakers slap the pavement in the darkness,
Back toward the diner, but it has been razed to the ground
(Likely the case, for all I know,
What with the mills silent and padlocked all these years)
And I paw madly, feverishly through the rubble
In search of some remains of those vinyl chanteuses of love songs,
Those epitaphs of our failures,
Those three-minute odes
To our compromised and conditional successes.

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 first leg of our troika was removed easily enough;

Courage is a mercurial thing, waxing and waning

As frequently as the tides--or, perhaps more accurately,

It is like the doomed cell hosting a virus,

Left a barren husk of its former self once the germ

Has gone about its business and moved on.

In any case, he has happily cast off the burden of leadership

So often and unwisely fixed upon our martial heroes,

Content to appear at parades and other events of state,

Answering the roar of the mob in an almost authentic manner

(Though just barely perceptibly less so each year),

Living testament to the notion

That it is easier to be lionized than to live as the lion.




I had convinced myself that a two-headed regime

Would be perfectly workable,

That I could be the yin to the yang

Of my erstwhile alloy colleague

(The intoxicant of power

So dulling my senses that I could believe such nonsense),

The contemplative man of thought acting as a counterweight

To the fiery man of action, the man of the blade.

I had somehow presupposed

(Such was the vastness of my delusion)

That my old brother-in-arms would defer

To the appeal of painstaking analysis and meticulous planning;

It was if I had forgotten that, provided with the genie-like largesse

Of the acquisition of anything he desired, he’d asked for a heart,

As if there wasn’t enough sturm und drang taking place

In that miniature steam boiler of a chest!

While I had buried myself in charts and task-force reports,

He had enmeshed himself in consolidating power.

When his yeomen, huge-hatted and well-armed

Came to my suite of offices to place me under arrest,

I was, at my core, not particularly surprised.




To parrot the line of so many of those who have shared a fate

Much worse than my own,

I am well treated by my caretakers-***-captors;

My living quarters are comfortable enough,

And I can read, write, and research at my leisure,

Provided I don’t attempt to transmit any of it

To the outside world. 

Beyond the boundaries of this small compound,

I am a non-person; neither my name nor image

Has appeared in the pages of the Daily Ozmapolitan

For several years now, and it is whispered

(With the full knowledge and abetment of the current elite)

That I am, in fact, gravely ill if not dead.

I could, I suppose, rage against my confinement,

Shout my grievances and pronouncements against autocracy

To the heavens, but my cottage and the outbuildings

Lie in a thickly forested place, and it has not escaped my notice

That all of these structures are built entirely from wood.

No matter, then; I am the victim, first and last,

Of my own foolishness, my own inability

To resist the nectar of power, the ambrosia of command.

I, of all people, believing the road could run both ways!

They fall upon us over the spillways of time,
Burbling at us through some Radio Free Nostalgia
Courtesy of some college station sitting at the far left of the dial
Or streaky CDs at the rear of some forlorn shelf,
And we know them to be to be, if not outright falsehoods,
Among the more variable of truths
(As all truths are, if we’re being honest about the matter)
For when someone sets out to create the Great American Whatever,
It becomes quickly apparent that such paths
Are not straight and clear, but wind and double back upon themselves,
Replete with thorns and weeds with bladed edges;
Egos must be stroked, revenue streams and margins considered,
Leaving one’s primary legacy as a testament to compromise.

But to be a casualty is not necessarily to be a fatality,
And through the narrowness of a three-minute window,
Purveyed to us by quartets of chanteuses
Who were no strangers to compromise their ownselves
(So many staged photo shoots,
So many hokey Christmas songs and cosmetic-sale jingles)
We can glimpse momentary epiphanies,
Crescent-moon slices of the verities,
Which, if not the whole truth and nothing but,
Provide us with something to hold, something to hum
As we go about the tortuous business
Of making some sense of the whole **** thing.

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.

His oaths were all crimson passion,
(Oh, fleeting, evanescent boy!)
But were simply passing fashion,
Discarded like some broken toy
Put on or off as he saw fit
(Not employed for some higher good:
The fondling of some harlot’s ***,
The plucking of some maidenhood.)
Prolifigate in the bedroom
In constancy, he remained chaste
Cast in the role of a bridegroom
The play’s ending he brought in haste
(I say this without levity;
Forever is but brevity.)

There was, in a once upon another time a man
(His name and work
Being lost to the boot sales and dustbins of time)
Who made a reputation as a portrait painter,
One transcending his small town in Schleswig-Holstein,
Spreading among the surrounding principalities.
Gifted with curious abilities (although he would demur,
Protesting that he was simply a man with a brush and a palette)
Allowing him to secure the favor
Of the area’s more substantial citizens,
Providing him leisure to commit to canvas
The faces of the ordinary
And, if some cases, somewhat iniquitous.
His portfolio a crazy-quilt of his milieu,
Subjects back-to-back in no particular order:
Princes and flower girls, priests and ******.


The sterling reputation the painter enjoyed
Was not due simply to technical skill
(He was, to be sure, expert in matters of shading and line,
And his eye for color and detail no less than remarkable)
But also an eye for those things
Revealed in the curve of the lips or the set of the eyes
And, more importantly for fame and purse,
The virtuosity to enhance the understated gifts
Or veil those unpleasant secrets they suggested.
And so, the venality in the banker’s sneer
Was softened to intimate nothing more
Than levelheaded concern for the sanctity of the mark and guilder,
Or the gentle smile of the prince’s youngest daughter
Augmented to evoke the beatitudes of the angels themselves.

The craft and subtlety of his work
Combined to engender the most curious effects;
Oftentimes his subjects, surely without consciousness or intent,
Began to assume those qualities  
Bestowed upon them by the nuances of line and pigment,
Becoming less parsimonious or more humane,
As dictated by the brush strokes,
Carrying on from that time forward as the finest embodiments
Of that visage captured inside the gilding of the frame.

At some point in time,
Whether through the onset of some trickle of madness,
Or perhaps just sheer whimsy,
The painter made a peculiar change in his methodology,
Beginning to graft qualities onto his subjects
Which they never embodied nor hoped to possess,
Perhaps in the hope that, having pinned them to the corkboard,
His butterflies might take wing,
But his command of light and pigment
Combined power and understatement in such a manner
That no one who sat for him ever noticed
They were being mocked or enriched, as the case might be;
And still the canvases acted as tails wagging the dog about;
Priests were found dead in their rectories,
In the midst of tableaus of unspeakable debauchery,
While courtesans lit candles and kneeled in pews
Until their backs and thighs screamed
In the service of such highly unusual positions,
Or the banker flipped the urchin a coin
While gently petting the boy’s undernourished cur,
And perhaps it was all due to the machinations of the painter,
But he would, with just a hint of slyness
Playing about the corners of his eyes and mouth,
Deny any measure of culpability.
He was, after all, just a man with a brush.

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

Anyway, I was livin’ up around Bolton Landing

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

But that’s another story for another time)

At the Sagamore—big fancy hotel on Lake George—

When I started hearing people runnin’ their pie-holes

About this crazy-*** pigeon.  

Folks were saying the **** bird

Had somehow got ahold of the idea

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

Swooping down like it was after rabbits or field mice

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

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

For just a little too **** long)

Swore on the gravesof their dear sainted mothers

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



Well, little towns are all about big talk,

So naturally I wasn’t about to put much stock

In this particular rural legend—but one day

I’m walking around downtown,

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

Down around my pantleg for a bit before it leveled off

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

Just for ***** and giggles.



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

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

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

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

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

And it could daredevil from sunup to sundown,

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



The third, or maybe the fourth, time

I happened to catch the bird’s act

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

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

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

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

Some days I would walk past the old McEachern place,

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

Just staring at the cloud cover hiding Mount Marcy

(Where eagles lived in the crags,

Breathing the rarified air that pigeons,

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



After a few months, folks stopped seeing the bird

And his wild-*** air show.  

Maybe it had been a bit slow

On the uptake while pulling out of a dive,

Or perhaps it finally came around to the notion

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

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

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

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

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

And the mysteries of why-they-do-what

So you can ponder and mull over

The collection of bugs and gravel in its guts

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

They walk—no, more likely, they saunter,
Embassy functionaries, associate profs at G-Dub,
A smorgasbord of polka dots and vitae,
Leopard-print and Linkedin pages,
Sufficent and necessary in their presents and futures.
I occupy a bench in my own shambling manner,
Denim-clad most days,
Perhaps affecting a less humble khaki
If I am feeling particularly grandiloquent,
Redeployed here from more rough-and-tumble of more avenues,
Among the bar-and-concrete hosteled llamas and coyotes
(Probably closer kin, if one is being honest)
Simply an ornamental thing, overgrown garden gnome
Or bowdlerized lawn jockey, unobtrusive and unnoticed
By those who would coo at the macaos and mandarin ducks
Or shudder at the offal left uneaten by black bears and maned wolves.
And so such days proceed, from my convenience-store coffee arrival
To such time that something approximating dinner
Must be conjured or cadged from somewhere,
My thoughts tend to stray not to the lionesses
Nor sleek Catwoman-esque jaguars,
But to the unpretentious turkey vultures of the fields of my youth,
Circling warily, inexorably in threes and fours above
And I know there is neither ennobling nor annihilation to find here,
No outcome but to simply await.

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.

It was not smoke getting in my eyes;
More likely the third shot of Wild Turkey
In relatively short order
Which made my eyes a bit misty.
I had come up North to that cold cow country north of the Thruway,
Ostensibly to reconnect with the prospective love of my life
To start anew, to set things aright
(She was a grad student, Electrical Engineering
But not precise at all--she was mercurial, Plath-esque,
Prone to both epochs of silent introspection
And inexplicable spontaneous combustions of rage.
I heard later she’d dropped out of the program
Without a word to advisors or anyone else.)
It had not ended up hearts and flowers,
The breakup, which left feelings bruised and china broken,
Was both unpleasant and irrevocable,
So with an evening to **** before the next day’s flight
(Out of Ottawa, **** near a two hour drive)
I was haunting a bar stool
At the prototypical North Country townie bar:
An endless series of the owner’s cousins jamming on stage,
Several dogs wandering the premises
A veritable kaleidoscope of buffalo plaid
In shades of red, green, and gray.
In such places on such occasions, somebody ends up as your buddy,
Which is how I came to be doing shots with one of the regulars
Who listened intently, sympathetically to my particular tale of woe
Until such point he blurted out (if one can blurt something sotto voce)
I used to bone a girl in the nuthouse up in Ogdensburg.

The particulars of the liaison came gushing out like whitewater;
He’d been laid off from the Alcoa plant up in Massena,
And landed a temp job at the state mental hospital.
There had been, so he said, no shy romancing, no overt flirtation
(And as my drinking buddy pro tem put it,
It’s not like we could do dinner and a movie)
She’d simply followed him out to the trash compactor
And, the whining of cardboard
Going to meet its maker serving as cover,
They had simply let Nature take its course.

The girl was not like the other denizens
Of that particular soft-walled motel,
A broken factory-second of a human being;
Christ, she was beautiful, he lamented,
Red hair, skin like half-and-half,
Green eyes that ate you up and spit you back out again.
He’d never been able to figure out the attraction--
I was just a schlub guy who’d never had anything but schlub girls
But he said that she’d told him she loved him--no more than that,
He was her very salvation, the feeling mutual enough that he said
If I’d been there any longer,
I probably would have tried to bust her out myself.

He found out later that she’d been put inside for killing her old man,
Hacking him into dog-food sized bits,
Then walling up the pieces in her dining room,
But he insisted, slapping his palm on the bar,
Swear to God, even if I knew that
I would have risked sneaking her over the border anyway.  
I asked why he’d never tried to hook up with her on the outside.
He stared straight ahead for a few moments.  
I dunno.  I heard she hung herself, but I dunno.
We drank more or less in silence after that,
As there wasn’t a hell of lot more either of us could say,
And as I drove the sparseness of southern Ontario the next morning,
I said a silent thanks to whom or whatever kept me
From giving voice to the urge to express my respect and admiration
For any woman with the ability to hang drywall.

She has maintained a steadfast and prudent distance
From places she would have to fabricate answers to tiresome inquiries:
The ageless Rexall pharmacy, the gas pumps at the Kwik-Fill,
The scruffy, three-checkout Market Basket,
(Though that entails driving to Bradford or Dubois for groceries,
Inconvenient at the best of times,
Outright hazardous when February shows its teeth)
But her resolve can be a fleeting thing,
So oftentimes she will yield
To the siren song of the produce aisle,
Where she will, with what forbearance she can bear,
Submit to the interrogative small talk
Lobbed her way like so many verbal mortar shells
By squinting, smirking long-time acquaintances,
All variations upon the inquiry Why’d you come back?

All homecomings are secondary to some departure,
Mostly the mad flight of one marooned by birth,
Deciding, through some alchemy of grit and desperation,
That they cannot face a life of a spot on the line at the mill,
A haphazard and half-hearted marriage with the requisite offspring,
To be finished up with an unremarkable stone on Bootjack Hill.
Her farewell was not such a notion, not in the least;
She was beautiful, not small-town pretty
In the lead-in-the-senior-musical sense,
But breathtakingly so, the kind of radiance
Which held up to the forty-foot screen of the drive-in in St. Mary’s.
There was no question that she would go, must go,
As if the notion of her staying was absurd, even obscene;
So she went, to New York for a brief spell
(She found it gray and cold in every sense of the word)
Then later to Southern California,
Which she found, if nothing else, somewhat more comfortable.
She did not fail (to be fair, her beauty was of a type
Which transcended mundane concerns such as locality)
Securing bit parts on screen here, the odd photo shoot there,
Not well-off, perhaps, but living well enough,
Free from the endless cast-iron skies and ***** slush of January,
The pointless yet sacrosanct internecine struggles
Which rolled unheedingly across the generations,
The stifling intramurality of the tiny lives in tiny mill towns.

And yet she came back, with neither warning nor fanfare,
Greeted by a cacophony of mute and uncomprehending stares,
As if she were some spectre, lovely and yet unwelcome,
Dredging up emotions best forgotten,
Half-truths not bearing the weight of re-examination,
Any number of errors of commission and omission best left buried.
She will, on occasion, make her way to a barstool at the Kinzua House
Where she receives drinks and further ministrations
From out-of-town hunters or younger townsmen
For whom she is not an icon or grail,
And if she is asked what brought her back to the cold cow country
She would say, a bit acerbically but melancholy as well,
At some point, you get tired of being a commodity,
Just something to weighed and assayed,
Your face worth this, your *** worth that,
But, if she was deep enough into the evening’s proceedings,
She would murmur snippets of odd things:
How the falls would pour like the cheers of thousands
Over the spillways of the dormant mills,
The spectacle of the sand swallows returning
(Brown, chunky, unremarkable things
Skimming the disintegrating chain-link
Which surrounded the abandoned middle school)
To the abandoned gravel pit just below the cemetery,
The herds of elk, reintroduced by the state conservation boys
In a futile and wholly romantic gesture,
Which have not only survived
But prospered on the hillsides out of town,
And if those who knew her when overheard her,
They would whisper among themselves
As to how she was clearly on the run from something,
And how everyone knows that the unrelenting SoCal sunshine
Can lead someone from a place like this to madness.

I’d heard a story in that proverbial once upon a time
(Though its origins are hazy, at best, to me now:
Perhaps something my son heard at Sunday school,
Or part of the never-ending nattering
From the marketing guy at lunchtime,
Maybe cackled by the crazy, toothless blind guy on the 16A bus)
Concerning the programmers who’d worked on a project
In the earliest days of nano-technology,
Creating software for their relative monoliths,
Australopitchecuses of artificial intelligence,
Serving as prototypes for some envisioned universe
Where tiny drones served the whims of some doctor or researcher
Operating unseen and omnipotent behind some microscope or monitor.
The trials went quite smoothly, almost flawlessly,
The models impeccably doing what binary switches
And if-then-else statements decreed,
But the researches noticed that
Just before they executed the final bit of code,
The models would invariably exhibit
A slight hesitation--almost imperceptible, infinitesimal even,
But clearly occurring, nonetheless.

They’d assumed, quite naturally, it was a mere matter of de-bugging,
Some misplaced comma or parentheses among the thousands,
But they reviewed the code any number of dozens of time,
Only to find it was clean as a whistle.
What’s more, they’d found that while the vacillation appeared
At the same point in the process,
It didn’t happen at exactly the same time;
Indeed, they cropped up, relatively speaking, months, even years apart.
One of the white coats jokingly referred to the pause
As the machines “Peggy Lee moment”
(You know, ‘Is that all there is?’)
But no one else involved the project saw the humor.
They’d decided to ignore or accept the quirk, though it was rumored
That it drove a few of the programmers to near-madness,
With one or two of their number bolting the project without notice,
Entering monasteries with the intent
Of shutting themselves off from the outside world
For the rest of their days, and its existence was buried
In reams of footnotes at the end of their final report
(Though as I said, the tale’s source is unclear,
And I am inclined to regard it as apocryphal.)

When I was a child, we’d lived on the edge of some woods,
Slightly hilly land, crossed with the odd stream or cowpath.
I’d walked there frequently, aimlessly,
Throwing the occasional stone here and there
(Skimming the smaller ones off the surface of the creek,
Displacing mosquitoes and dragonflies,
The larger rocks reserved for thickets of trees,
Rewarding me with a rich thwack if the missile found its target.)
Once I had tossed a great gray projectile
(All but shot-put sized, probably nicked and nibbled
By fossilized trilobites on its edges)
Into a stand of old horse chestnuts,
But the sound that emerged was not the woody report expected,
But an anguished and almost astounded cry,
Nearly human in its astonishment and pain.
I’d winged (more than that, in truth **** near killed)
A hawk sitting inexplicably low in the branches.
In my panic and puzzlement, I’d wrapped the bird in my jacket
(The hawk all but shredding its lining,
Adding to my mother’s already fervent agitation
Over having a wild bird in her kitchen not destined for the oven)
And taken it home, where we’d put it in a cage
(Not a bird cage per se, but the old crate for our dog
Who had wandered into these woods
A few months before when she’d sensed her time was at hand)
Where it sat silently for a couple of days,
Refusing food, water, or any other succor,
Simply staring at us with a searing look conveying a hatred
Which transcended species, language,
Any and all experience a child may have been privy to,
As, in those fresh-scrubbed, clean-linen days of youth,
I had nothing of the hawk’s knowledge of cages.

No tinkly tintinnabulation of children’s songs precedes him;
The vaguely Sputnik-esque speaker on the van’s roof
Squawking out Ernest Tubb and Hank Snow,
(The ice cream man is a hillbilly fan)
Tunes so out of time as to be almost beyond time itself,
Not unlike his ancient, off-white conveyance,
A vehicle of no particular make or model,
Bearing license plates issued years if not decades ago
(One thinks that the DMV would have insisted upon their replacement,
But the ice cream man likely retains them through force majeure,
And it would be no surprise if he did not find himself subject
To such notions as licenses and registrations.)

His arrival is not subject to any calendar but his own.
When his truck announces itself for the first time,
It is, by definition, the height of spring;
You notice the leaves have become a fully-formed green canopy,
And you eschew a bathrobe
As you saunter out to find the morning paper.
The next ten, perhaps twelve weeks are a blurry kaleidoscope,
Rife with cones and bomb pops, drumsticks and choco-tacos,
Dispensed with a high-wattage grin and a hearty Mind how you go!
But the ice cream man is always searching the sky
(Sometimes, you would swear he is actually sniffing the air)
Seeking clues like some ancient trying to ascertain the future
In the pebbles and small bugs in a crow’s innards.
At some point, be it late August or mid-October, he is gone,
Leaving you to instinctively grab a windbreaker
If you leave the house after suppertime,
And the shorts and t-shirts are consigned to some large plastic bin
As a matter of course.

Invariably, at some point during his curbside season,
There is the urge to ask him where he goes
Once he determines that his time has ended for another year;
Surely, he cannot live on the quarters and dimes
He tucks into his improbably white apron,
And he must have his obligations to banks and landlords
Not unlike any other man, but somehow the idea
That the ice cream is under the thumb
Of coupon books and past-due notices
Is oddly unnerving, indeed unseemly.
In our minds, he has always been and most likely will always be,
Engine hacking, sputtering, then implausibly purring
As it pulls away from the curb,
Its confectionary conductor
Humming some long-lost Cowboy Copus tune
Which trails off into nothingness as he disappears from view.

It would be inaccurate, indeed downright unfair,
To label her as a convenience,
Certainly no matter of being any port in a storm;
She fell into that category of handsome women,
Tending more to the Rubenesque than the runway,
And those occasions where an evening with the gang
Fragmented into a somewhat unmatched set
Were more in line with settling into a familiar harbor,
Bereft of the intoxicating hazards of shoals and sand bars, perhaps,
But comfortable with a certain steadfastness about it,
A pleasant haven from the riptides, undertows,
And various entanglements of the open water.

It was an aneurysm that took her, the type of thing
We’d associated with grandparents, aged aunts,
Corpulent colleagues of our fathers.
What’s more, it turned she was staunchly and stubbornly Lutheran,
Regular to the point of obsession in her attendance at services
(We’d no way of knowing such a thing, of course,
The notion of staying overnight at her place
To rise from last night’s sheets at mid-morning
And share a table for omelettes and awkward chit-chat
Being both curious and curiosity)
So we arrayed ourselves in stiff collars,
Accompanied by ties we’d hoped to be suitable,
As the whole affair had us a bit off balance,
And we were only able to restore our equilibrium at the end,
Just in time to attempt to bounce pebbles onto her coffin lid
In what he hoped was some witticism in Morse code.

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.

There was, every spring, a new batch of pups,
Yipping, nipping, clumsy ***** of ***** fur,
Looking for all the world like speckled tennis *****
Before they’d learned any hard lessons
At the hands of a racquet.
They chased their tails and each other,
Not to mention various other denizens of the barnyard:
Frantic chicks, cranky piglets,
The occasional bemused draft horse,
And sometimes they chased us as well,
Yelping childishly, rolling with us on the ground,
Nipping bare fingers and toes,
Afterwards lying on the ground asleep,
Looking , save for the rhythmic twitching of their paws,
Positively angelic.

Come late August,
The time would come to set them on the *****.
We’d long since stopped thinking about it,
Much less questioning it
(I had, one year, asked my father if the puppies had to go
One time too many until,
With a look that brooked no further conversation,
He said flatly It’s what they’re born to.)
So we went on with the business
Of the soft, slow late summer
Until one evening just after sunset
We would hear the baying of the hounds
Out toward the back fields,
Mechanical and workmanlike at first,
But soon strained and syncopated with excitement,
And at some point there would be
A cacophony of cries and snarls
Until such time there was only silence.
The next morning we would visit the dogs,
And we’d pet them and rough-house a bit,
And there might be an oddly rouged spot
On their coats here and there,
Or one of them might sneeze out a tuft of fur
That didn’t rightly belong to them,
And every year our Uncle Bryce would slyly opine
You boys may want to be a bit more careful
Around their mouths now, hear?

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.

What did the poet say?
Success is counted sweetest by those who ne’er succeed,
Yet such a sentiment is wrong, deeply and distressingly so,
For the nectar of success proves most enticing
To those whom Dame Fortune
Has coquettishly extended her index finger
And, twirling it ever so slightly in the air,
Has let him taste (for the briefest of moments, mind you) the tip,
A momentary sensation in the merest fragment of time,
But the sweetness, the utterly transcendent joy
Contained in that single frame in the long movie of one’s life,
Becomes not a cherished memory
But an unfathomable grail which engulfs all other desire,
Supplanting any semblance of prudence or reason
Until its recipient is no more than a small boy
Who, forsaking all other toys, hurdles bicycles and baseball bats
In the absurd pursuit of a runaway kite
Which has wholly bewitched him
By the alluring pull of the string,
The mad and joyous dance against an endless field of blue.

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.

There are, dear daughter, oceans between us
(At your insistence, though I say this without rancor)
A buffer from the memories of our sad antics,
Pottery reduced to shards, doors slammed in such a manner
That the very jambs ached in regret,
The hinges wept in the weight of their sadness,
Though the human heart, mapped by its own wan geography,
Is immune to such trifles as mere distance.
We have tarried in foul gardens of sophistry,
Engaged in predictable shows of dramatics,
As if our outbursts can be measured in some calculus
Seeking to ascertain our devotion
In the rending of garments, the shrieking collapse upon the floor,
For it has been revealed to me
That the spectacle of our grand lamentations,
Worn by us like the finest silver-threaded garments,
Are no more than the strutting and preening
Of some noisome, foul peacock.
No, we must accept, indeed embrace, the notion
That our love is as imperfect as our selves,
And that we must approach its altar
Not with grandiloquence and haughty pomp,
But meekly, bearing the simple gift our person
Modestly cloaked in the simple black gown of humility.

Together we probed mysteries of the dark
Though you said true love was for losers and saps
(Oh God how I loved you, my Joan Jett of Arc.)

You moaned like a ****** those nights in the park
As I tried to snare you with all of love’s traps.
Together we probed mysteries of the dark.

I was a way station, no more than a lark,
Though I searched your eyes for a trace of perhaps.
(Oh God how I loved you, my Joan Jett of Arc.)

I sought to engender romance’s first spark
In the wake of unfettered zippers and snaps.
Together we probed mysteries of the dark

Our orbit of something completed its arc;
I sang Ave Maria, you whistled Taps.
(Oh God how I loved you, my Joan Jett of Arc.)

One morning the truth hit—cold, brutal and stark;
You’d left unannounced, leaving me to collapse.
Together we probed mysteries of the dark
(Oh God how I loved you, my Joan Jett of Arc.)

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The collie, fur grayed and patchy, lopes away from his house,
Ostensibly bound for nowhere in particular,
Knowing only that it is that time, his time,
And, as he wanders away for to await that last solitary purpose,
Meanders past a pock-marked and rust-patched single-wide,
Occupied by a young woman (a girl, in truth)
Nursing a newborn, child whose father
Is one in a wide range of unpalatable options.
Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah.

They walk, the residue of some boy meets girl,
Along the quiet main street of an equally quiet town,
Utility poles garnished with benign, contented snowmen,
Low-hung five-pointed auguries strung with tinsel,
Brobodingnagian candy canes swaying rhythmically in the wind.
They have arrived at the unspoken yet mutually understood conclusion
That they have taken their particular accident of birth and geography
As far as such a thing may go, yet they walk hand-in-hand,
Fingers intertwined, though tentatively, in some interim rationale.
Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah.

On a hill above town, there is a rambling, low-slung edifice
Multiple-winged single-story octopus of a house
Well appointed though sparsely and diffidently decorated,
More hotel than home, decidedly transitory in form and function.
In one of the rooms, dimly lit with little ornamentation
Save a Charlie Brown-esque tree squatting forlornly on a bureau,
A woman is reading softly, almost mechanically,
As if it is a story she has read out loud countless times before,
To a man who is heeding, perhaps, though it is clear
That the act is more essential than the words on the page.
They have a daughter who would be there,
Sitting in a chair or on the edge of the bed,
Hands clasped, though in service of or supplication to nothing tangible,
But she is home with her toddler, a whirligig of a child
Who has found some hidden presents
And is tearing away the wrapping from the boxes,
Laughing unrestrainedly as he showers himself
In a red-green-gold ticker-tape maelstrom.
Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah.

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.

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.