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.

This thing—unsanctified, uncertified
(Reminiscent of an old, familiar sweater
Comfortable, perhaps a bit threadworm here and there,
Yet wholly functional)
Has become unwound,
Not in some spectacular supernova
Replete with shouting and finger-shaking,
But slowly, almost imperceptibly becoming patchy and care-worn
Until such point it no longer provides much
In terms of comfort or warmth,
A failure of evolution more than an excess of passion,
A matter of recalculation as opposed to recrimination.

Let us proceed onward, then, with as much decorum as we can muster.
Parse the checking statements, divvy up love seats and ottomans
With an emphasis on equity rather than enmity,
Leaving the plates and cups intact
Passing them on (a bit dewy-eyed, perhaps)
To begin anew in some niece’s college apartment
Or with other friends who shall gallantly attempt
To complete and compute what we could not,
Divining some math which leads not to our own aftermath
Of reasoned rumination in search of some cold consolation.

She noted, grimly cognizant of though unamused by the irony,
That her likeness, or something akin to that,
Appeared on the poster—a gray-clad strong and vibrant woman
Reaching, in concert with her comrades
(One woman in a white coat, a man in overalls and requisite cap,
Still another androgynous figure in a futuristic ensemble
Resembling some cross of a Western science fiction movie
And some cheap Petrograd-made tin foil)
Toward a hammer-and-sickle adorned moon
Soon to be conquered by a similarly festooned rocket ship.
She is no scientific apparatchik, no technically gifted party functionary;
It is her job to feed the canine occupant of this mission to the cosmos
(Two mutts from the Moscow streets, she confides to Ilysa,
One of the few co-workers who can be trusted with such a statement.)
The dog, she notes without any trace of rancor, eats quite well,
Better than she does in truth,
But it is a series of last meals for the condemned,
For there is no secret as to the dog’s eventual fate
(Poor cur, he has no idea he is doomed,
One of the scientists clucks sadly,
Though she simply shrugs in reply,
Knowing a test or a trap when she sees it,
Though she thinks to herself He is far from alone)
And, after she has cleaned up the remnants of the dog’s dinner,
She heads back to her one-room flat on the Yaseneavaya Boulevard,
Noting ruefully, as she ascends the crumbling, unsteady steps
Leading to her blocky, faceless building,
That the omnipresent klieg lighting of the street lamps
Serves to obscure any trace of the heavens in the night sky.

Oh, there is light in such places:
The galleries of Soho, the catwalks of Milan,
The boardwalks of Blackpool,
But it exists to flatter, to obfuscate, to tell alluring lies,
A trompe l’oeil of a family picnic
Etched on the wall of an abandoned orphanage,
The siren song crooned by a spider
To the enraptured and wholly credulous fly.

Ah, but the illumination here!
The sun reflecting off the roofs
On those Bob Evans and Shoney’s you would shun,
The starlight backed by a host of owls, a symphony of crickets,
All serving to peel away the layers of artifice and cunning,
To be shucked away like so many cornhusks,
Allowing the secrets of the universe to be whispered to you,
Faintly yet unmistakably, and once moved by these epiphanies
What is to stop you from running along the narrow, unlined streets
And green open spaces in mad, unfashionable celebration,
Exempt from the clucking of the chic and the congnoscenti?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s perfect nonsense to suggest that, whether venal or mortal,
It would announce itself with fanfare and hullabaloo,
All but taking out a three-column ad in the trades
To trumpet its arrival.
Its métier has always been the dimly-lit corner,
The whispered admonition,
The ****** room in a somewhat undesirable neighborhood,
And while it is certain that it accompanied us
As we emerged, still scaly and seaweed strewn, from the sea,
It did so on a light unsullied by moonlight,
Surfacing silently with the least desirable of piscine attributes in tow.

It is generally supposed we come to this place
As a just reward for treachery and traitorousness.
Indeed, nothing could be farther from the truth;
Most of my compatriots her have blindly hitched their fortunes
To some flag, some shining dogma, our fates sealed
Through an unwillingness to be sufficiently self-interested,
The refusal to abandon ship once it became apparent
That the experience upon the rocks
Would be neither enabling nor ennobling.
My own case is illustrative of the rule;
My father, noble sovereign ascending to the throne
Via parlor tricks and the rustic embrace of folk legend,
(The fornication resulting in my birth brushed aside
As some accident of mistaken identity or enchantment)
Is celebrated, beatified really, in song and legend,
Yet I, who pulled myself up by my own bootstraps as it were,
Winning his queen’s hand and defeating him on the field,
Am consigned to this unhappy place in perpetuity,
Suffering demons who hiss *******! Usurper!
As they put me through my paces
(One takes their rebukes with a grain of salt;
They are all mad, the likely result of dealing with this glut of madmen.)
As I noted, the presence of myself and my brethren in this place
Serve as a testament to the merits of fidelity,
Which we commemorate daily, some days several times
(I confess it seems more than a touch silly,
But the necessity of creating distractions
Trumps other concerns in a locale such as this)
By staging caucus races, each participant addressing
The ******* in front of him directly,
Paying it fealty--My liege! My liege!--which is answered in turn
By a cannonade of noxious farting
(We assume the smells to be offensive,
As the atmosphere here is somewhat deleterious at all times)
All to the great amusement of those sprites
Who observe our machinations,
They in turn guffawing madly and urinating downward upon us
While we, as the acidic waste corrodes us, also cackle like lunatics,
Fairly shouting Ah, the gentle rain of Heaven--thank you, Lord!
Though, oddly enough, our laughter at times
(Most likely due to the aridity of the atmosphere around us)
Seems to catch a bit in the throat.

He will allow, if you press him on the point,
That it can be a hard go sometimes;
Holsteins have no concept of weekends, he will say,
Or Christmas, for that matter,
But all that being said
With a smile practically gushing contentment.
He has, for thirty-plus years now,
Worked some four hundred head, dairy and beef
In this cold, flat valley where low-pressure systems come to die,
Bringing the detritus of low clouds and snow flurries in tow,
Sometimes even into the middle of May.  
He is not unaware the outlook for his homestead is hazy, at best;
He has consciously blocked out how much he is into the bank
For feed, the re-built corn silos, the new Case tractor,
And both of his sons have long since fled south,
Preferring the comfort of powerpoint presentations and cubicles
To a cold, dark milking house in the middle of January,
But he has seen the future come and go,
Dwelling in the misbegotten debris of the recent past:
Huge, slightly Fifties-space-movie-flying-saucer satellite dishes
Pointing forlornly directly at the horizon
Outside shuttered and foreclosed upon houses
Which litter any number of the back roads,
The yellowing signs promoting cheap internet access
Taped to windows in small, half-empty strip malls in Gouvernuer,
All cause enough for him to opine at virtually every opportunity
I have seen the future, and I can confirm
That it clearly ain’t what it used to be.

He could have, if he had of a mind to do so, gone in another direction;
Unlike most of the farm kids,
Who were packaged as a unit into the General Ed track,
He’d tested himself into the College Prep classes,
Where several of his teachers made it a point to tell him
Virgil, you need to understand that you’re a bright kid.  
You can do other things, go other places,
And one or two of his instructors were downright offended
That he chose to take over the farm immediately upon graduation,
But he knew at an early age—no, had always known
That he would remain in this place, on this patch of land,
Even though he could not even begin to explain
The whys and wherefores of his decision,
Language being the ungainly
And wholly inadequate instrument that it is
(This is why, he would say every Sunday morning
At breakfast with Gerald Glass and Earl Tiefenauer,
The both of them rolling their eyes in tandem,
Knowing exactly what came next,
The Akwesasnes went hundreds of years without a written language;
They were smart enough to know that all words do
Is just get in the **** way)
But he knew that what was in the gentle, serene chugging,
The rhythmic pop of the ancient machinery
At the  Karsten place over on the Heuvelton Road
Flinging another squared-off hay bale into his jerry-built wagon,
Or in the blue sky which stretched, impossibly cloudless and glorious,
From the St. Lawrence up north down to Fort Drum
And onward for several forevers either way besides,
Was greater and weightier than anything in the cloth-bound red Bibles
Which sat in the pews at the Presbyterian church in Madrid
(Not his father’s church, but the blustering, cocksure Baptists,
Sure as death itself as to the absolute inambiguity of the Word
Were simply not his kind of people)
Which he had begun attending some half-dozen years ago,
Not because he was a particularly spiritual man by any means;
He had simply been unable to sufficiently convince himself
That all of this could happen strictly by accident.

We need more Martians , they nattered at me all the time,
More monsters—people like to be scared,
As if those callow youngsters,
Growing up with two cars in the garage
And three sets at the country club,
Their fraternity mixers at Whittier or Occidental,
Knew the first **** thing about terror.
Still, they wanted me to grind out the harum-scarum hokum
They enjoyed watching two-reelers on Saturday afternoons
While men were doing hard work in Leyte and Manila,
As if the transitory fear of some ghoulish bogeyman
Would last through the thirty-second epics
Featuring some cartoon bear shilling for beer
Or bunnies extolling the virtues of toilet paper.
Let me tell you what fear is, I would say time and again,
It’s a padlocked fence and a smokestack
Which isn’t churning out a **** thing.
It’s the jobs you can’t get because you said something
(And more likely, you didn’t) twenty years ago.
It’s one more envelope from the bank or the phone company
With bold red lettering on the front
That you don’t open because you know what it says
And how it doesn’t matter one bit,
Because you can’t do a ******* thing about it,
And these promising young men would just look at me
Like I was some poorly made-up extraterrestrial
From one of their Buck ******* Rogers potboilers.

Several of my neighbors here were among the men,
Mostly boys in truth, who marched with the 126th New York,
Taking fire at Petersburg and The Wilderness,
At Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor.
We have spoken about the horrors of war,
The kaleidoscope of confusion and dread,
No direction leading to shelter, no road guiding the way to home.
They have said that, as frightening as the sound of the minie *****,
Zipping overhead like malevolent flies,
And the cannon were, what they found truly awful
Was the manner in which those fields,
So like the ones where they had flushed out quail as children,
Became foreboding nightmare landscapes,
Containing a dark madness
That they never dreamed could have existed.

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

There was another brother whom history forgets
And though born a fisherman, he preferred other nets.
The coterie of rink rats who lived on the Left Coast
Thought he was sine qua non, and they would often boast
He’s better than his brother Joe,
Es-ki-mo Di-mag-gi-o.

His slapper had heat to make a goalie wet himself;
His wrister was money either five-hole or top-shelf.
After the goaltender felt another puck **** by,
He’d curse and bang the crossbar as fans took up the cry
He’s better than his brother Joe,
Es-ki-mo Di-mag-gi-o.

He dominated rinks out West like no other man
From Calgary to Saskatoon, Fresno to Spokane.
He’d hat tricks in Winnipeg, six-point games in Moose Jaw
Moving scribes to hackneyed verse written in fits of awe.
He’s better than his brother Joe,
Es-ki-mo Di-mag-gi-o.

Though the man was a fine skater, strong, agile and fleet
The slightest flaw in the ice caused anguish to his feet
And he would scold arena crews—What’d you call this mush?
‘Tis nothing but chips and ruts; I’d rather skate on slush!
(More prickly than his brother Joe,
Es-ki-mo Di-mag-gio.)

After one match in Oakland on ice unduly rough
He stormed into the locker room, shouting ‘Nuff’s enough!
He didn’t change his sweater as he stormed out the door,
Hopping on a trolley car, to be seen never more
(He’s a bit loony, don’t you know.
Es-ki-mo Di-mag-gi-o.)

He was sighted in the Yukon, once or perhaps twice
Engaged in some mad mission to find the perfect ice.
Neither man nor beast can say what became of this fool,
Though bits of skate lace appear in petrified bear stool
(Tastes better than his brother Joe?
Es-ki-mo Di-mag-gi-o.)

There’s no arguing that idealism has its place,
For if it does not flower, bloom, and spread its seeds
As the dying dandelion casts downy remnants hither and yon,
Then we have wept our tears and trodden in funereal processions
In pursuit of nothing more tangible than the wind itself.
That said, my boys, we shan’t live out our days
In some misty fairyland where the streams run with single-malt
And the trees are heavy with lamb and rashers;
This world can be a bitter, unpleasant place
(The unconditional love of mankind
Being the sole province of Our Saviour)
Where a man will give his wife a quick peck goodbye,
Then give a swift kick to a limping puppy sitting on the stoop,
Or the kindly veterinary will raise a lovely mouse
Just below his missus’ right eye
Upon returning from his local on a Friday night.

That ‘s the game as it’s played on this pitch,
And injury time has a whole new meaning here, lads,
For many’s the striker who is carried off
With pennies over his eyes.
Again, we have no quibble with Locke, Voltaire,
And the rights of man,
But know this: your leaflets will tear and blow away,
And speeches which roll through Parliament and trade union halls
Like great thunderstorms which blow in from the North Sea
Shall fade into the silence of minutes bound and shelved away
In some corner of the vast library of the forgotten.
You may shun the handwork of Messrs. Lee and Enfield,
Simpering that the rifle is the gavel of the coward,
That the garrote plays the music of the ******.
Tell us, then, where the bravery lies in scribbling crimson prose
While ensconced in the warmth and safety of your rooms,
What dignity is gained by meekly dropping your gaze
When confronted by the stare of the Black and Tans?
There is no valor in sighting down windmills.

Oh, we’d talked of other lives in other places,
But where would we have gone, anyway?
(It was rural Pennsylvania in the thirties,
And being well-off meant you ate three times most days
And could afford meat every other Sunday)
So we carried on in anguish and guilt as old-maids-in-waiting
As there were dinners to cook and cows to strip out,
Fireplaces to stoke, any number of chores to do
While our mothers and fathers waited patiently for that day
When we would, each in our turn, don a grandmother’s wedding gown
And march steadfastly down some acceptably Protestant aisle
While Gert Bauer, default church organist
Though she was past eighty and nearly blind,
Tortured the wedding march, flubbing notes and stomping pedals
The tune lurching forward at an inconsistent
And unusually adagio fashion.

As it turns out, Tojo and Adolph Schicklgruber
Interceded on our behalf,
For, as the young and able-bodied men of Elk County went off to serve
(Farm boys from Wilcox and Kersey, pool sharps from Ridgway,
Fully half the production line from the paper mill in Johnsonburg)
Someone needed to man punch presses and die casters,
So we were able to find work making propellers
In a windowless and airless factory
Which didn’t have women’s rooms
Until we’d been there for three months
Allowing us to set up house together
(We told our parents
It would allow us to save up toward our weddings,
And still let us give them grocery money each couple of weeks.)
Eventually, Johnny came marching home again
And back into his old job,
Which left us somewhat at sixes and sevens,
But, like Blanche DuBois,
We came to depend on the kindness of strangers
Who believed in the value
Of strong backs or the primacy of civil service scores
And so with our steady if unspectacular incomes,
We were able to carry on keeping house, as it was said,
(Our parents sadly unpacking hope chests.
Sullenly gifting us the linens
They’d purchased for our marital bed at Larson’s,
The hand-made quilt stitched and fussed over
For nine months by Aunt Jenny)
And maintain an uneasy truce with the good people of the town;
Indeed, we were all about “don’t ask, don’t tell”
Long before it was somewhat fashionable.

When it became apparent that she would not carry on much longer,
Or, as she put it, Now I’ve got an expiration date,
Just like a can of soup,
It was as if the populace had decided, after some sixty years,
To take their revenge upon our ******* of the natural order,
As if they were a pack of wolves,
Having identified the lame and the sick among a herd of whitetail,
Tightening the circle before moving in for the ****.  
In truth, I shouldn’t have been surprised,
But the pettiness and the tight, self-satisfied smirks
Were no less painful in spite of that.
And what was your relationship to the deceased?
They would say with their half-knowing, half-offended smiles.
I’d wanted to shout at the top of my lungs that for fully six decades
She had been the love of my life,
Without question and without deviation,
Not like the banker who dallied with his fat secretary,
Or the claims rep who, taking a personal day when her pipes froze up,
******* the plumber right on the kitchen floor,
But years of secrecy and compromise exact a toll,
So I simply, quietly, matter-of-factly would reply
I am the executrix, thank you.

We had talked of perhaps heading west
To make honest women out of each other,
And, later still, of burying her in Paris or San Francisco,
But tight times and walkers and wheelchairs
Made such plans unworkable;
It’s only parchment and granite, she said,
What do they mean at the end of the day, anyhow,
And so when the time came
She asked me to take her ashes up to the top of Bootjack Hill
And scatter her to the wind.
Make sure to go all the way to the top, she insisted,
*I want to get good and clear of this place.

He is the sort who seems well cast
As the Grim Reaper’s right-hand man:
Hulking, deliberative in movement and thought alike,
Generally doing the heavy lifting of the direct route to the afterlife
With a grim solemnity not shared by the funeral directors
In whose service he lifts, wrangles, and grunts
(They are, to be fair, not the black-hatted, pale-complected ghouls
Littering Dickensian tales or Monty Python sketches;
They are businessman, Rotarians, purveyors of cheerful websites
And nine-year-old giggle-worthy sponsorships of Little League teams)
Performing his duties wordlessly, monotonously
Sparing no time for idle chat or frivolity
(Though on one occasion, when Lew Jackson from over in St. Mary’s
Brought in a women that he’d known as a girl,
A girl who had found time under the bleachers for everyone but him,
And had turned that gift into two stories of gabled comfort
Plus a membership at the Elk County Country Club;
He’d looked at the box and sighed Well, this is a bit of a surprise.
I’d always had her burnin’ up somewhere else.)

Crematory Lenny is a fisherman, his normal haunts
Some shady bank on the Clarion’s East Branch,
Or one of the sturdier railroad trestles just outside town
(The trains not having run through Montmorenci Falls in his memory)
Though if there is a Sunday where his ministrations are not required,
He will drive up to the Kinzua Dam,
Sometimes eschewing pole and tackle altogether,
Choosing to simply wade into the silence of the reservoir.
He is strictly a catch-and-release fisherman,
Even returning sunnys and chubs best simply thrown on the creekside
(Good stream management and all that)
Back to the water, freely admitting that, in culinary terms,
Perch, trout, and bass are simply take-it-or-leave-it propositions.
Sometimes, though, he will foul hook one,
Or come upon some fish deeply scarred or tumor-ridden,
And he will reach into coat or pants pocket
To remove the garden ***** he never travels without,
Proceeding to dig a small hole, just so wide and so deep,
To serve as a final piscine resting place.
He would not, indeed could not, begin to explain
The whys and wherefores of these internments,
Being a virtual Caiban if matters stray from the weather and shop-talk,
Nor does he pause to ruminate upon the dearly departed,
Simply casting once more in stealth and silence,
With no sound save the whizzing whisper of the drag, the brief plop
As the lure breaks the surface.

Custom, tradition, and the twang of steel guitars
Strongly suggest I should embrace my station
As the woman done wrong,
Weeping quietly in some dark corner
At the Come On Inn,
Or, even better yet,
Wailing in a full, tear-stained voice.
Know this; I will not Patsy Cline for you,
Any man or moral of the story,
Nor will I indulge myself
In some country-crossover measure of revenge.
I will march into that bar,
And play that song for whoever on the jukebox,
Dancing without a trace of regret or malice
And I will leave that old roadhouse
In the same manner I will live
The rest of my days here on earth;
Head high, chin forward, shoulders straight
Alone or accompanied
As I—and I alone—see fit.

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

If you put the question to, say, one Ben Haramed,
He would, as befits a wily old desert jackal,
Find such notions of faith and fidelity quite amusing--

(Following stars in search of something ephermal,
With no fixed exchange rate?
Will these specks of light find you shelter
Among throngs of shepherds and sundry fools?
Will your mewling, puking infant provide you succor in that cold city
Where no one makes time for you, save the pickpockets or strumpets,
Each of whom would pawn your drum
For a dram or string of brightly-colored beads?)

And, indeed, if you happened upon a certain wise and well-off trio
Ensconced comfortably in their lodgings several streets distant
From the temporary residence of the object of their pilgrimage
(It is only fit that we pay obeisance,
But to actually stay in such a place, well...)
They would certainly forswear any notion
Of the primacy of the gold piece and the blade
But if you caught them in a more comfortable, unguarded moment
You may able to infer quite correctly that,
While they would express themselves more elegantly
Than some rude wilderness bandit,
You could no more expect them
To exchange their coin of the realm for philosophy
Than you would expect the fold and kine
To keep perfect four-four time.

And yet we believe, in spite of the first-hand knowledge
That the descendants of Balthasar and Melchior can elbow their way
Past whomever they choose, and be greeted, all smiles,
By the bank manager, the lawmaker, the chairman of the board
That our works and our constancy
Shall be recompensed at a sound rate of return
(How could it be otherwise, for didn’t Our Story Teller herself,
Through stiffness of upper lip and fealty
To all things bright and beautiful,
Weather the Blitz as beautiful, as inspirational,
As a cross-Channel Joan of Arc?)
If only we are as steadfast as the chant of the Dies Irae,
As unwavering as the straightforward beat of a single drum
Which follows the procession down the main thoroughfare
As we make our final homecoming.

We’d known each other forever, or all the time that counted, anyways,
Sitting side-by-side on the bus from kindergarten
Until you and your mom moved up to Fifth Street,
At the cafeteria table, on the swings at rec
(Despite the considerable risk of contracting girl cooties)
And always but always on the gym bleachers for movie day,
Which, on the day in question, was "Paddle To The Sea",
And as I sat and watched the small, hand painted wooden craft
Improbably navigate the great blue ribbon
Bisecting the land of apple pie and Chevrolet
All the way to the Gulf of Mexico and into the great, blue ocean
It was as nothing else--that gym, the other kids
The comforting clack of the ancient eight-millimeter projector,
And, for that forty-odd minutes, even you--did not, could not exist.
As the lights came up, I looked over in your direction
Noticing the remnants of tears on your cheeks.
Hey, it’s OK to cry, I said
(Girls allowed such luxuries, after all)
But you whirled around at glared at me
(Even at that early age, stunned at the depth and breadth
Of my misunderstanding, my utter stupidity)
And said in a tone which neither sought nor brooked argument
That just can’t happen. No toy boat ever makes it to the ocean,
And for any number of days afterward
You would, apropos of nothing, angrily blurt out
How stupid, stupid, stupid that movie was,
And how you hoped they would cancel movie day from now on.

We had, nature taking its course and all that
(As I used to say to you at the time,
It’s not my fault you ended up with ****)
Our dalliance in that murky interval beyond friendship,
Fumbling about your bedroom
On those afternoons in-between sport seasons
Or on the old Friday night in the back of the balcony
At the old Rialto Theatre
(In its final death throes at the time, deserted enough most nights
I could have taken you right in the front row wholly unnoticed)
Though always within limits,
As you had no designs on becoming
Some drop-out baby mama patiently home-bound,
Spending mornings sweeping the detritus of the mill
From some weathered, crumbling front stoop
While waiting for me to come home from a spot on the line
As we lived happily hand-to-mouth ever after.

It could not, of course, have lasted.
The fall came where you headed off to Cornell,
An unlikely landing spot for a mill-town girl;
We sort of stayed in touch for a couple of months,
But come the tail-end of your second semester
You simply disappeared without a trace.
The sheriff’s boys up there had assumed you’d jumped
Into one of the scenic gorges
Which were the pride and joy of the town’s Chamber of Commerce.  
(I’d laughed in spite of myself, the notion that you would end up
In some pool below a waterfall or some shallows of an inlet
Almost too cosmically comic to fathom)
Though there was a rumor that someone fitting your description
Had dove into the Seneca Canal
(But clad in a bathing suit,
Like someone enjoying a brief, early-season swim)
And for the briefest of moments I had a vision of you swimming
Up to Clinton’s Ditch to where it met with the Oswego Canal
And the big lake, going up the frosty St. Lawrence
And thence to the very Atlantic itself,
But I knew that was a fancy, indeed an outright madness
Inconceivable in the small-town cosmology
Of a young girl intimate in the true nature of toys and oceans.

It was one of those places which,
We were instructed with stern tones
And the occasional smack to the ****,
That we were not to go,
A place of childhood sing-song
(River man, river man
He’ll sink his teeth right in your can)
And, later, of clandestine beers and smokes,
Or furtive encounters
With steady sweethearts and short-term solutions.
He’d set up something akin to a lean-to
Hard by a reasonably well-sheltered bank,
One wall of rocky dirt, the other comprised of lumber
Which had been abandoned or purloined or somewhere in between,
And if you resided in that narrow niche
Where you were too old to be scared shitless of him,
And too young to dismiss him out of hand,
He was of a mind to accept a bit of company,
Possibly share a bit of somewhat-warm, store-brand soup,
Even a bit of coffee, if you’d developed the taste for it.
He’d been in the merchant marine, or so he claimed,
Driven there by the search for some constancy
He’d never been privy to in a land-locked world,
Figuring the ceaseless expanse of the ocean
And the regularity of shipboard routine the vessel to all that.
He’d been deeply disappointed, of course,
The waters a kaleidoscopic maelstrom of blues, grays, and purples,
Alternately hammock-smooth and Gothic furious,
All in nothing even mildly evocative of the regularity of the seasons,
And so, he intimated, he’d jumped ship in some unglamorous port,
Living on the run (though for how long was an open question,
And the whos and whys of his prospective captors
Not a subject that he nor his listeners were of a mind to broach)
But he’d never quite been able to shake the lure of the water,
And so he’d set up housekeeping by this particular stream,
Convinced the current held some epiphany, some augury
Which occasional suggested but never truly spoke to him
(Can’t trust the water, and can’t trust the land,
And that hain’t left me much ‘n terms of other options,
He was wont to cackle twice or thrice an hour.)
One day, before some of us were of a mind to see him leave,
He was gone, leaving no trace behind,
Perhaps run off by some officious sheriff’s deputy,
Perhaps by his own leave, searching for some river bed
Which spoke more sweetly, more distinctly,
Or perhaps he came to believe there was a third dwelling option
Somewhere on the banks of the jet stream its ownself.

(for ed hart)

well, you fell out of a tree
(beguiling, bewitching, the tips of the branches
long fingers gesturing to you, whispering
listen, kid, i got a secret to tell you.)
and, boom, that was the first time your collarbone got busted up.
maybe later you were just daydreaming, or, more likely,
drunk on some boone’s farm or some girl,
anyway at some point you decided ******* it,
i’m just not falling anymore,
but there was always some cracked pavement
or some tree root hidden by a patch of grass
you missed with the mower,
a million sundry distractions besides,
and one day don’t you just know
that you stuck your hand down  to catch yourself
(of course, you knew how **** stupid that was
the moment you reached earthward,
but the die already cast and all that nonsense)
and, bam, there’s a wrist, snapped like dry kindling.
well, maybe, if your’re lucky enough
and the right angels are looking out for you,
you live long enough to figure out that you’re gonna fall,
and the trick is to hit and roll on your good shoulder.

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

It was every bit a part of her as her fingers or her voice
(That being an instrument mostly unused now),
And it didn’t matter that she might be wearing stripes or checks,
Not that she spent a great deal of time fiddling with her clothes,
Preening herself in the mirror like some dried-up peacock,
Not that she’d done so at any stage of her life,
As that was for the vain:
Young girls justly so, or faded prom queens who,
Despite all evidence to the contrary,
Refused to accept the primacy of decay.

It’s not like I was never young, you know she would demur,
And, in fact, she had played along-- she’d gone to the dances,
Gossiped at the sleep-overs, tried her hardest to work up enthusiasm
During the pep rallies before the games against Ridgway or St. Mary’s,
Even allowing herself to be courted by a shy, gentle offensive tackle
Later lost in Korea, forgotten boy in a forgotten war,
But there was always something not quite right,
A certain air of fragility and impermanence,
(Even though the presence of the Montmorenci Mills,
Hulking solidity of brick and mortar and yelping machinery,
Cradled the town in its enduring embrace
And beyond town, endless hills encumbered with spruce and pine
So thick the forest floor never saw so much as a glimpse of daylight
Between December and mid-March)
A curious buzzing, droning and mosquito-like,
Saying in a persistent whisper Surely this can’t be all there is;
There must be something true, something fine,
Something enduring to hang one’s dreams upon.

She was right, certainly, on the larger point;
The mill closed, thrusting the town into a collective limbo
Where they couldn’t divorce themselves from a reality
Which no longer existed, and, as the years rolled diffidently onward,
Morphed into something that never truly was
(Meanwhile the woods, inexorable as some ancient, half-blind old bear,
Digesting the odd abandoned hunting camp or hobo’s lean-to,
Seemed to creep farther toward the main roads each year),
And each year brought fewer inquiries
As to her availability and amenability
Until her solitude was final, impenetrable;
Indeed, she never found reason to look back upon on those days
Where she could have been half of something,
Save for the several occasions when (for no reason she could fathom,
Which in itself perplexed her to no end)
She thought back to the time they visited the fortune teller
Who had a tent, the opening of which she watched nervous, hawklike
At the county fair over in Clearfield,
And the mystic had taken one look at her hand,
Tracing the palm mournfully
And said, in a voice shackled in an unspeakable sadness,
*Poor little thing, you’ll never see forty, I’m afraid.
I’ve never seen a lifeline that short.

Don’t give me some dark, inscrutable muse
With faux chaste coyness and misleading smiles;
Give me a memory that I can use
To carry me through the endless gray miles
Of venal ensigns on a windswept deck,
Days sighed away under monochrome skies.
I’ll recall a broad (and she’ll let you check)
With the fleet’s emblem tattooed on both thighs,
A bawd who can take a beer and a shot,
Who’ll let you wear the dress, if you prefer.
She’ll let you have even if you have not;
God bless those sailors who sail in her.
Who needs some girl who’s all cashmere and class?
Give me the **** you can grab by the ***.

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

Back in the day before the game quit us,
We’d balled down at the rec center with an old guy
Who went by the name of Terry Easy.
He was there every afternoon, every night
(As far as we knew, he’d been there forever,
The joke being Hell, man, Easy was there
Three minutes after they got the floor down.)
Big old dude, but you could tell from the way he moved,
Even the way he walked, that he had game at one time,
Though he’d gotten to the wrong side of the transition
From solid to just plain fat
(We’d woof at him Easy, you get any more flab on your *******
And we’re gonna have to go from shirts-and-skins
To bras-and-blouses, for chrissakes.)
And he played with coke-bottle glasses so thick
You figured he couldn’t hit the backboard from outside three feet.
Still, if you didn’t pick the man up a few steps across half-court,
He’d bury you with set shots --‘course, if you played him too tight
He’d just back-door your *** for layups all night
(As far as playing D went, Easy was pretty easy pickings,
Though he’d try to make up for a lack of foot speed
With old man tricks--locking his knee behind yours
To push you off the blocks, a quick grab of the shorts
As you cut through the lane, stuff that starts fights,
Though taking a shot at Easy was just something you didn’t do
Something unspoken that you just knew was out of bounds.)
Between games, Easy would tell stories about his playground days:
He’d played on all the courts with all the legends,
16th and Susquehanna with Lewis Lloyd and Sad-Eyes Watson,
48th and Brown with The Pearl,
Ridgeway Playground with Wilt and Hal Greer.
One day Easy was telling a story about how Greer,
Playing out the string with a Sixers team
That won nine **** games all season,
Was playing against Wilt one night when the Lakers were in town.
Hal went down the lane, and Wilt was right there,
Getting ready to swat the pill…hell, eight, nine rows up,
Maybe halfway to Doylestown, but at the last moment
He pulled his hand back, and let the ball tap, tap, tap on the rim
Before it dropped through for two
(For old times’ sake, Wilt said later.)
Hal didn’t see it that way, giving Wilt a shove and glaring at him
All the way back down court, and after the game
He stormed into the Laker locker room,
Screaming Where the **** is Wilt? I’m gonna beat his ***!
And, catching sight of the big man, hollered ever louder
You play it straight with me, *******, you hear me?
You never disrespect my *** on the court again! Never!
All the time two or three guys holding Hal back
(And understand, Wilt was the biggest, baddest man in the game;
Hell, one time he picked up Mel Daniels,
Six-feet-nine of evil and bad temper, like a Raggedy Andy)
And the big man never said a word, ‘cause he knew was wrong,
So Terry told the story, anyway,
And Easy should have stopped right there,
‘Cause the story was over, but old men get foolish, get all soppy,
So he says Hal was right, understand-;
You just can’t do that to a man.
Old player like Greer, maybe all he’s got left is his pride,
Like some old lion who can’t hunt no more, but he’s earned that.
Gotta let a lion have his pride, and after he finished
All the young ‘uns just hooted at him
Man, Easy, you do go on, and for months afterward
Every time the dude covering him turned his head
And gave Easy an easy bucket, everyone on the court
Would just laugh, and yell That’s good huntin’, man.
Roar, lion, roar.

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

You get
lost in detail
(Augurs? Portents? Symbols?)
They shine: you'd be advised to do
As well.

It is like shaking hands with a bag of oyster crackers;
Joints sprained, ligaments torn, fingers fractured
And splayed off in several different directions
Like a weathervane that has had a rather nasty shock, indeed,
The whorls of his fingertips, the uneven rise and fall of the knuckles
Serving as a travelogue of a lifetime spent
In towns not quite ready for the big time:
Olean, Oneonta, Visalia, Valdosta, a dozen more besides,
A million miles on buses
Of uncertain vintage and roadworthiness.
Each scar and swelling, each uneven path
Between base and fingertip has a tale of its own;
The ring finger on the left hand first broken
By a Big Bob Veale fastball that was supposed to be a curve,
Later snapped again by Steve Dalkowski,
Who, drinking quite a bit by then
(When ol’ Steve had put away a few, he notes ruefully,
You didn’t want to hit him, catch him,
Or sit in the first few rows behind the plate)
Most likely never saw the sign
Indicating slider instead of high heat.
The index finger on his throwing hand?  
Well, that was from a foul tip in…Wellsville in ’59?  Walla Walla in ’62?
When you’ve bit up by the ball as many times as I have,
You tend to forget what you tore up when.
Ah, but no such problem with the right pinkie;
That was snapped one cold April night
Somewhere between Winnipeg and Duluth,
During a poker game when a backup infielder
Produced an unexpected and wholly inexplicable king
Seemingly from nowhere.

But those hands!  They were, in the lexicon of the scouts
(The same ones who labeled him
With the dreaded tag of “good field, no hit”)
Who trolled the sandlot parks
And high school fields of his childhood, “soft”;
Indeed, he could cradle a ninety-mile-an-hour fastball like an infant,
And, with the gentlest and most imperceptible of movements,
Turn the wildness of a nineteen-year-old phenom
Into an inning-ending third strike, and even now,
Two decades of bad lighting and jury-rigged equipment
Having turned the topography of his digits craggy and asymmetrical,
They seem as smooth and supple as they were at nineteen,
With all the strength and unsullied smoothness of youth,
As he grips and waggles an unseen bat
In the course of retelling
(In his one brief, glorious spring in camp with the big club)
How he doubled to the gap in right-center
Off none other than the great Whitey Ford himself.

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

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

She ambles, cautious, methodical
(In her world, there is no time and place
For something so frivolous as traipsing)
Through narrow and informal trails which criss-cross
The slump-shouldered hills above town,
Thick pine stands obscuring the abandoned woolen mill,
The ungainly pock-marks of the abandoned quarries below.
She is in love (but coyly, chastely) with the mountain laurel,
Unremarkable and unprepossessing in its pallidity,
Demure foil for the hawkweed, the Indian paintbrush,
The resigned counterpoint without which
The beautiful may claim no more than some vague quality,
Some ethereal, gauzy notion which sets them apart.
She has no pretensions concerning her own self
(Plain as the dirt on Bootjack Hill, she reckons,
Although she entertains the odd fanciful notion:
Small hotels in Corfu, out-of-the-way Parisian nightspots,
Tete-a-tetes with second sons of some minor baroness)
And she contents herself with the occasional ramble over the knolls,
Meandering silently among the ubiquitous tiny flowers,
Joining them in understated and minor communion,
The mute and muted envy of the canvas
Toward the bright and showy pigments of the palette.

They arrive by the sackload from the main office on the Via del Pontiere,
Pouring from the bags as if a torrential weeping,
Envelopes a collage of shapes, a multiplicity of pastel hues,
Some addressed with all the formality of a judicial summons,
Others bearing no more than the name of the distaff half
Of the city’s most famous equation.
They tread upon paths long since worn flat
By any number of their predecessors:
Tales of love unrequited, passion misspent,
Promises untruthful and unmet.
These epistles and their authors
Seek solace of varying degree and efficacy:
Some seek kernels of actual guidance or blessing,
As if some ancient and inscrutable advice columnist
Had taken up residence in the Basilica di San Zeno,
Others looking to self-heal through the catharsis of the act of writing,
Most content to quietly assert to the universe itself
I am here, I am here, I am here.

Where, then, is the corresponding mountain of missives
For the son of the House of Montague?
Surely, his shade would be as kindred a soul
To those which affairs of the heart have left so disheartened,
(Indeed, more so, he most assuredly
The schemer and dreamer of the dramatis personae in question.)
For him, though, no rambling, rumbling truck
Emblazoned with the lemon-cheerful Posteitaliane markings
Arrives at an office chock-a-block with secretaries
Whose mission is to answer and archive its all-but-holy contents;
More likely, there is some humble cart,
(The wheel bearings frozen up, the canvas mildewed and frayed)
Containing a handful of birthday cards
Intended for some Renzo or Romano
Miswritten by some absentminded grandmother or great-aunt,
The odd solicitation or final-notice
Which shall go no further for all of eternity.
Despite the hectoring tone of the envelope
Stating that the material is critically time-sensitive
And intended for the eyes of the addressee only.

They do not, like their more esteemed Californian cousins,
Sweep into town over sloop-festooned, canvas-checkered waters,
Passing over the remnants of missions
Packed with the ghosts of Christian guilt and romantic swashbucklers;
They labor at their workaday altitude just above the treetops
Still budding in the newness of May,
Pausing to rest on the jagged orange chain-link
Which surrounds the dormant mills,
Or perhaps a sill fronting a boarded window at the old school
Before taking to their summer quarters at the abandoned quarry
A couple of miles up the Klondike Road,
and invariably one of the old-timers will say
Little birds hain't much too look at,
But at least they come back every year,
And then not giving the simple brown creatures another thought,
As they find no particular interest in the notion of flight.

She is there at the water’s edge
Most any day she can wheedle and whine her mother to the water,
From the intermittent teasing warmth of late March
And all through the languid North Country summer
Until such time she is there,
Mitten-clad and scarf-wrapped like some miniature Tut,
Bracing against January’s razor-blade winds in those last few days
Until the few gurgling rills and streamlets are nothing but ice
All the way up to the big river in Ogdensburg.
She scrambles down to the bridge abutment
Hard by the Riverside Cemetery
Dropping a Popsicle-stick craft
(Its sails snips of cloth or bits of green-bar paper,
Its cargo a message stapled into a sandwich bag)
Into the river, sent on its way
With a brief and whispered benediction.
Most times, the craft founders almost immediately,
Taken under by a sudden gust of wind or large stick
Perhaps a carelessly tossed forty-ounce Hamm’s empty,
But on occasion the boat will stay upright and precariously totter along
Until it slips out of sight past the bend near the hospital,
And she claps her hands, convinced that yet another one
Is on its way to the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the great blue ocean.
An onlooker might cluck and shake his head,
And tell her that such a toy
Would never make it outside the village limits,
Certainly never past the big bridge on Route 58 at Elmdale
Or the one further on up past Pope Mills,
Let alone to the Seaway,
But he might check himself, perhaps sensing
That there had been disenchantment
For one life already,
So he might instead make gentle inquiries
As to what messages are carried in the plastic baggies.
She would (her voice all mock-sterness though the eyes betray her)
Answer simply That is between me and the angelfish.

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

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

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

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

There’s no love that’s forever true,
No guarantee he’ll stand by you.
Heed well, then, what I have to say;
You keep that boy six feet away.

It’s in his worst nature to roam—
Ensure he’ll always stay at home.
Make it impossible to stray;
You keep that boy six feet away.

If he refuses to see sense
And does not show you deference
Then put him and his toys away;
You keep that boy six feet away.

If he feels something is amiss
Purchase his silence with a kiss.
Then always by your side he’ll stay;
You keep that boy six feet away.

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

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

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

He’d always had the fastball.
It was, according to the second-tier phys ed teachers
And young, un-tenured math instructors
Who comprised the area’s high school coaching community,
Unlike any pitch they’d ever seen,
And the hapless shortstops and left-fielders
Who meekly waved in its general direction as it crossed the plate
Simply shook their heads, glared out toward the mound,
Or, in the case of one chunky red-haired clean-up hitter
From up in Clearfield,
Threw a bat at him in a mix of embarrassment and frustration.
(He’d simply stood on the mound,
Grinning as the piece of wood sailed harmlessly by,
And he’d yelled back in at their bench,
Listen you bunch of woodchucks,
There ain’t nothing you can do to me
With a bat in your hands no way no how.)

His success was uninterrupted, unparalleled,
With no taint of failure or adversity
(He’d always told the scouts who asked him to pitch from the stretch
Mister, when I’m pitching, ain’t nobody gets on base.)
And when he’d signed his contract,
Which included a bonus of twenty-five hundred dollars
(Little more than chump change to the ballclub,
But all the **** money in the world to him),
He’d figured it was just the first step
In an inexorable process to the big time
The possibility that he could be no more than an afterthought
Never so much as crossing his mind,
But though he had the fastball, it was no more imposing
Than several dozen other pitchers in the organization,
And it had the tendency to be straight as a string
On its journey to home plate,
Easy prey for players who had grown up
Facing good pitching twelve months a year,
And his other offerings
(The notion of needing a Plan B on the mound
Having scarcely occurred to him)
Were rudimentary and unpolished things,
Child-like roundhouse curves,
Change-ups which announced themselves
Long before they ever left his hand,
Plus lacked what the scouts and developmental types
Liked to call a “projectable body”,
No six-foot-six, no frame that spoke of growth and untapped power.
He still had the dream, but offered the big club little to dream upon.

He spent a couple of years in short-season ball in Upstate New York,
(In a small, down-on-what-little-luck-it-ever-had city
Where the right field fence
Butted up against a maximum security prison)
Cleaning up the messes in blowout losses,
Soaking up innings on cold, damp early June evenings
In places like Watertown or Little Falls,
Where the threat of frost lingered almost until the summer solstice,
So that those arms which were part of the big team’s future wouldn’t be put at risk, Spending his late mornings and later evenings
In any number of identical shopping malls, Super 8’s and Comfort Inns,
Bars named The Draught Dodger or Pub-N-Grub,
Where the women of one A.M. appeared to be intoxicating, glamorous,
But were all dark roots and crow’s feet
In the grainy light of early morning,
Pale tell-tale halos on the left ring-finger,
The redhead of Erie indistinguishable from the blonde in Oneonta.

He knew that he was simply a spare part, a body to fill out a roster,
But come his third spring with the organization,
He’d asked--begged, really--for another full season,
One final shot to make good,
But the farm director just sat back and smiled ruefully.
Son, he said after a seemingly endless pause,
We’re all pretty much day-to-day.
After a few weeks back Upstate
(He’d only pitched once, to one batter,
Who he ended up walking on four pitches),
A new crop of polished collegians and high-school hotshots
Were signed on the dotted line and ready to roll,
And one night, just before the team bus was leaving for Batavia,
He was called in to the manager’s office,
Where he heard what he had dreaded,
But knew was coming as sure as sunrise:
End of the line, kid.
We have to let you go.

So he went home.  
He’d laid low at first,
Dodging the polite small talk or wordless looks
Which all boiled down to What are you doin’ back here?
Eventually, he emerged from his old bedroom at home,
And if someone at the Market Basket or the bar at the Kinzua House
Asked him what went wrong,
He’d shrug and say he’d got caught in a numbers game,
Or it was politics--The guys they spend a million bucks on
get a million chances, Y’know?
But he knew that for those kids
Who had never been good enough to dream,
The notion that Bobby Rockett couldn’t make it
Said something about their own futures
Which was too bleak, too awful to contemplate.


A couple of weeks after he was home,
His official release arrived in the mail,
The ballclub’s logo all but jumping off the envelope,
Bold , bright gold star with one point tailing off
In a hail of inter-stellar dust, comet-like, into nothingness.
He hadn’t bothered to open it before he chucked it into the trash bin
(Though he almost immediately regretted its loss,
His playing career already a different life,
With few tangible bits of proof to prove he’d been someone, something.)
He supposed he’d go get a job at the mill,
Or maybe go into selling insurance with his dad,
And there was always a pretty good semi-pro league in Pittsburgh
If he got the jones to do some pitching
(Still, that was a two hour drive each way,
And somehow he never just got around to doing that.)
Some nights, just before sunset,
He would drive out to the high school ballfield
Glove and bucket of ***** in hand,
And, wearing a good landing spot with his battered spikes,
He would throw (the motion so easy, so clean,)
Pitch after pitch across the plate,
The knowledge that his velocity was more or less undimmed
Leading him to smile grimly, almost conspiratorially to himself
As throw after throw rattled the backstop,
Sounding for all the world like so many metallic crows
Settling into a grove of scrub trees on a late August evening,
The nights growing imperceptibly longer
As they proceeded inexorably toward autumn.

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

i.

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

ii.

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

iii.

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

iv.

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

v.

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