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

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

He had been this month’s bright, shining hope,
Producing bits of promising prose poking out of obscure journals
And higher-brow magazines here and there
Like shoots of tiny grasses between cracks in the pavement.
Then there was a novel--not good, really,
But flecked with sufficient promise
To leave the arbiters of culture wanting more,
But he departed the publication party
With a foot heavy on the pedal and the tires light on tread,
Thus precluding a sequel.

And so he remains, beyond the slow decay of time
Or the clucking and tut-tutting of critics
Who, bored, cranky, and ultimately undone by their own limitations,
Cannot help but add the dross of a touch of bronze
To all their former golden children.
Yet as his peers grow older, their lives in various states of disarray,
Their legacies vacillating between disrepute and utter disinterest,
He remains, on the dust jackets of first editions
Or inside the covers of the quaintly priced paperbacks
With their quasi-psychedelic artwork,
Completely untouched by the passing days and years,
His smile bright, hair dark and curly,
His potential limitless and unsullied.

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

They’d had him dead to rights for poisoning the well,
Least wise as far as they reckoned,
His fingerprints all over the pail
(Not the only set, but there in a goodly number nonetheless)
And footprints more-or-less conforming
To his boots in size and tread
And perhaps all that wasn’t stitched up as tight
As the sheriff’s boys would have liked it,
But there were other factors,
Things inferred and whispered
It being a place and time where truth
Was a sufficiently malleable thing
(There was also the testimony of one woman,
A lover, perhaps, or at least in her own visions,
Whose sworn statement was punctuated
With wild gesticulations and shrieking denunciations
As to how the accused had shredded all vows holy and otherwise,
The whole thing close enough to madness
That it was surreptitiously removed from the record)
And the trial was a brief, perfunctory affair
The defense attorney literally in shock
From the cavalier manner by his objections were waved away,
His motions for mistrial and subsequent appeal
Disappearing into some void of bored court clerks and paralegals,
The upshot of which was one man
Fitted with an unappealing cravat
Paraded before a sufficient gathering of onlookers
(But a quieter affair than such things normally were,
The harsh cacophony of the cicadas,
String section tuning for some discordant symphony,
Rising above the hum of the attendant mass)
And as the proceedings rambled onward
Towards its unwelcome conclusion,
The guest of honor grimly mused
As to how restoring of the water table and its potability
Would do little to put things to right.

He was, to be sure, very impressive indeed,
His bearing and carriage not of someone on his way
As much as one who had truly arrived:
Sleek, self-assured, possessing the calm of one
Who fully understands just how powerful he is,
One who has not embraced the company culture
As much as self-immersed in it,
To the point where it has so permeated his structure
That is hard to tell where he begins and it ends.
And yet, there is something unsettling there,
The odd non sequiturs, disturbing enough
In their utter and unconscious wrong-headedness,
But even more so
In the motorized, perfunctory method of their delivery,
As if it were obvious that it is we who are clearly incorrect.

Some three hours of drive time away,
Past any number of Holiday Inn Expresses,
Past numerous faded and shuttered Catskill resorts,
A handful of people carrying standard-issue banker’s boxes
Containing the detritus of twenty or thirty years of work
Exit the vestigial office the company maintains in its birthplace
(Only there as a nod to history, a sop to the locals and legislators.)
We hate to lose good people,
The HR person who drove up for the occasion
Intones solemnly to a handful of reporters
Who slouch nonchalantly in folding chairs
Scattered about a small, Seventies-wood-paneled conference room,
But there are certain market inefficiencies at work,
International incidents, kinks in the supply chain,
Other anomalies the forecasting tools
And business models couldn’t have foreseen.
And as he speaks, one of the newly superfluous
Wordlessly enters her car, pointing it homeward,
Across the sluggish, ice-clogged Susquehanna traversing  a bridge Commemorating a giant of cash registers and calculators.

He'd lived in the remaining house on the little byway,
The place and its existence somewhat accidental
As it was built as the groundskeeper's cottage
Accompanying a rambling edifice
Built by a former president of the mill,
That once-grand structure gone to rack and ruin
Nothing remaining save the odd bit of foundation
Poking forlornly above crownvetch and milkweed,
Though the lot of the man we'd dubbed the ogre
(The notion that he had an actual name
Not occurring to us at the time,
Though, as Nicky Demmer wisely noted
Whatever it might be, it must be unspoken.)
Was only slightly less unkempt and foreboding,
And it is hard to remember what exactly made him
Something to be feared and avoided at all costs,
Perhaps the combination of height
(Though lessened yet somehow accentuated
By a slight yet perceptible stoop)
And a widow's peak at the top of an unusually high forehead
Bookended by wiry and unruly locks,
Perhaps the fact that he rarely appeared in the daylight,
And then squinting as he turned his head to the sky
In the manner of one who fully expected
That it would fall, Chicken-Little style
But in any case his lawn
Was strictly no-man's land,
And any wiffle ball or frisbee,
Regardless of how new it may be
Or the retribution attached to coming home without it,
Remained behind, mourned but forsaken
And at some point we moved beyond our unease,
Too old for such superstition,
Moving on to other totems, other portents
Though some years later I happened upon his obituary,
Laying out the signposts of an ordinary
Though vaguely underwhelming and melancholy life:
He'd worked on the third shift at the mill all his days,
Thus precluding much of the social commerce
With his fellow man, no Rotary or Odd Fellows rites
To be performed at his service
(Of which there was none, burial being private as well)
And the list of survivors was limited to one daughter
Wholly unknown to us, ostensibly taken elsewhere
By an unmentioned and unmourning mother.
The item, brief and unadorned as it was,
Brought me back to that fretful nine-year-old self,
Though imbued with a greater disquiet,
As I had a deeper knowledge of the finality
Of cold, agate type, among several other things.

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

They’d signed on for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health,
Though they’d never dreamed that poor and sick
Would arrive with such ferocity,
Such vengeance, such utter malice.
Difficult to say how they found their way
To this particular section of down:
Too little of a taste for the three R’s, too much for two-buck chuck,
The whys, wherefores, and timelines not mattering much
When you’re falling ***-over-teacup Jack-and-Jill style down life’s hill.
They’d tumbled far enough to be holed up
In the front room of a structure approximating a house
Down on Elizabeth Street,
Looking like a Home Sweet Home a six-year old might draw,
Stairs, doorways, and window casings
All uneven and madly impressionist,
The thing not particularly successful at being air or water-tight
(If the folks from animal welfare found a dog in the place,
They’d be likely to go in and get it somewhere safe.)
They are huddled under what sheets and afghans
The nuns from Saint Rose were able to cobble together for them
And so they lay in ancient and unsteady sofa-like objects,
All but unable to move
(Though if he groans and thrashes enough to bare arms and legs,
She will summon something from somewhere
And painfully shuffle over to him
To retrieve and re-arrange his coverings)
Nowhere to go, no one to go see or to come see them,
Little left to do but wait for God
(Closer to Jordan than the Hudson,
Far as rivers go, he is wont to say)
To belatedly disburse some mercy, divine or otherwise,
Then to be pine-boxed and potter’s-fielded.
They have never see fit to ask any why-thems:
Little time for such luxuries, perhaps,
Or maybe the questions and answers simply more of a burden
Than the already over-burdened can bear,
Or maybe, as she said to one of the nuns
Who comes now and then to do what little they can,
Lord reveals things to us in a whisper,
And an angry stomach and shiverin’ bones
Conspire to make such a woeful noise.

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

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

You move beyond the luxury of panic,
Beyond the realm of heroic measure,
To such a point where clarity is superseded,
Itself a linear matter and beneath further concerns,
Beyond cursing yourself for failing to heed
Such self-imposed caution as had taken you this far,
And a life does not flash before ones eyes
As much as thoughts and images
Hopscotch into consciousness
Without a particular plan or pattern:
The party you left early, being under strict orders
To be home at such-and-such a time,
Only to be greeted by your mother
Who seemed genuinely surprised
You would take such strictures to heart,
Sundry boxes carried out of sundry workplaces
Under an equally broad array of circumstances,
Times you'd laid back upon the ground,
Looking at the clouds as or like a child
With no rationale save that it seemed like a fine thing,
Any number of snippets trodding on each side of the line
Separating memory and hallucination,
Wondering at last how a body mostly composed of water
Comes to such a pass,
And then there is nothing but.

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

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

There was no romance per se,
Certainly nothing which would lead poets or philosophers
To hold their hats over their hearts in reverent awe,
Perhaps one or two de reiguer chestnuts,
But they both were bit players in a milieu
Where the hustle was the coin of the realm,
And the comfort of their pro tem cohabitation
Was strictly a surface thing;
Indeed, she stirred from half-sleep
To see him out of bed, already more than half-dressed,
(Not at all surprising, this being the time of day
Where such young men made their money,
Some package to be delivered or message relayed,
All in service of some crumpled-up tenner
Never missed by its purveyor
But life's blood to its recipient)
And she watched silently
As he sauntered over to the window
To where a group of boys were out well past
What would be considered bedtime out in the suburbs
(It being the last weekend before
They would be corralled into classrooms once more)
And he leaned out the window,
Addressing them with a somewhat paternal growl,
Hey, my little heroes--time for you to get inside.
Gets cold at night 'round this time of year.

There exists all manner of confinement: bricks and bars, of course
The reward for having fallen out of favor with some jurist,
Black-robed and clad with a fitting solemnity,
But any number of others as well--all less tangible, less corporeal,
And, as such, all the more insidious.
The most forbidding of all confinements, though,
Are those of our own making,
Or (even more maddening, more exasperating) those of our own being,
The limits of our sight-lines at the horizon,
The boundaries of our own perception,
The tyranny of the senses.

Suffer my folly, then, to put out to sea
In the hope (though I fully understand
If you term it something else altogether) of finding
Some odd grail residing in the interval between dreams and the defined,
Though possessing can achieve nothing more
Than to taint it with the stench of the workaday.
I know that this mad exercise in carpe diem will not likely end well;
My safe returns dependent on instruments and forecasts,
Man-made and consequently fallible.
When such time comes, keen some song of the dead for me
As you wail upon the beach, if you must;
I will have likely achieved some semblance of peace.

(POSTSCRIPT TO AUTHOR'S NOTE:  As the bit of my brain which allows me to actually complete a piece of writing seems to have gone on hiatus, this chestnut is re-submitted for your approval)


We’d stumbled upon it simply by chance,
Playing on a channel heretofore unknown to us,
Almost as if the remote, in a final, desperate attempt
To escape the CGI-augmented Britneys and Biebers,
Had taken matters into its own hands and steered us there
(Indeed, when we tried to find that channel later,
It had gone a-gleaming, replaced by some lower-case Telemundo)
Presenting no outsized and over-decibeled spectacle
But a stark, quiet, indeed all but silent black-and-white panorama
Where a distinctly un-scrubbed and un-homogenized Santa
Delivers no new cars, no cartoon-mouse vacation cavalcade,
No million dollar prize from some scripted faux-survival experience,
But those things from the realm of the small, the subtle:
A sweater, a meal, a bottle for those not overwhelmed by the contents,
All courtesy of a purveyor of gifts seeking nothing more
Than to provide some measure of comfort and joy
For those who were well short on either.
It all tends toward the romantic and maudlin a bit,
One could contend
(And, indeed, did not the teleplay’s progenitor
Insist on spending his eternity on a lonely hilltop,
In order that he could have an unobstructed view
Of the cold, narrow lake
For which he’d formed such an improbable and irrational fondness?)
And those who take such a position may very well be right,
But it is equally likely that we could be better men in a better place
If the notion that we could rise above
Our tin-can and yowling-tabby tribulations
And embrace that within ourselves which is child-like and yet saintly
Was submitted for our consideration on more than an annual basis.


(AUTHOR'S NOTE: This poem owes a considerable debt to the December 23, 1960 episode of The Twilght Zone.  The episode, entitled "The Night of the Meek", features Art Carney as a decidedly down-on-his-luck department store Santa who receives a helping hand courtesy of Messrs. Serling and Claus.)

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

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

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

You would not, as a rule, find her ilk in these parts;
Indeed, frat boys from the state school from a few blocks off,
Failing to heed the subtle changes inherent in the urban landscape,
Will occasionally stumble into this where-they-don’t-want –to-be
And, paying no heed to decorum or traffic regulations,
Get to some anywhere-the-hell-else in a hurry,
But she walks, oblivious yet impervious to her surroundings,
Around this part of Quail Street pretty much every day,
So much a fixture of the landscape
That she knows most of the folks on the stoops and porches by name,
Those she can’t remember bestowed with pet names
Such as “Bright Eyes” or “Little Foot”
Or some other appellation which does not engender street-respect
(Indeed, once in a while, someone unfamiliar with her repartee
Will get up with the intent to Shut that stupid ***** up,
But they are met with a restraining hand on the shoulder,
Not a confrontational grab, but a pressure which says
We just don’t do that to this lady on this street.)
Those responsible for providing sanctioned aid and comfort
Are of varied opinion as to her being help or hindrance,
Her strengths being more attuned to the mercurial than the measurable,
(Though all involved marvel at her ability
To seemingly waft into the frame when necessary,
Simply materializing to hold a baby or push a car to the curb)
And, to the outright consternation of some of the sisters from St. Rose
Who come to minister this pew-free flock,
She pays fealty to a multitude of gods
Who occupy an ever-changing hierarchy in her pantheon of deities
(But those are the catechism textbook nuns,
Whose professions of faith are rote blunt objects,
Women who confess everything but the sin of pride)
And she brightly spouts notions which centuries ago
Might have earned her a public burning at the stake,
And even now makes some of the sisters a bit uncomfortable,
Nattering on about how all things are of the same matter,
Immutable yet indestructible (though her happy mutterings
Are sometimes interrupted by an uneasy rasping cough,
And no one can say, after all, where she sleeps, how she eats)
More often than not punctuating the sing-song psalms
By kneeling to the pavement and kissing the very dust and detritus
Littering the street, all the while tittering *Holy, holy, holy—see?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There were a surfeit of items
Sufficient to raise eyebrows or cause comment
Among the few staid members of the Mulligan clan:
The appearance of siblings or cousins assumed (or at least hoped)
To have preceded Thomas to the choir invisible
Two or three women genuinely surprised
To discover the existence of one another,
One young man with an extremely disconcerting resemblance
To his “Uncle Tommy”,
But the entire affair carried on with something akin
To the requisite solemnity
Until such point that a couple bottles appeared
(The consensus being that the good Mulligan
Had somehow found a way to secret them in)
The end result being the proceedings
Subsequently devolved into an Irish cop wake-esque teleplay,
And in the midst of this fol-de-rol, Tippy Phelan,
Who had framed walls for generic bank buildings
And grunted and swore while cobbling together
Unnecessary cupolas and wholly superfluous cornices
On the McMansions of the small town well-enough-to-do
With Tommy (as well as, on Friday lunch-times
During the slow season, sharing a thermos
Containing a mixture which drew narrow-eyed stares
From lenient if still unhappy foremen)
Stood the final toast for the good Mulligan,
Intoning There’s a land of the quick and the land of the lost,
The trick being to build a sturdy span between them
So it’s only proper that Tommy was a ****** fine carpenter.

(In memory of Glen Slater)

Ya stupid sonuvabitch, the place is deserted!
It’s gotta be a ******’ night game, ya ******’ mook,
But though the parking lot had the forlorn look
Of a down-on-its luck strip mall on a weekday afternoon,
There was just the hint of activity and indeed a game,
A friends-and-family affair with the Cubs,
Losers if not particularly lovable,
So we departed the ancient Gremlin
(Ostensibly painted cab-yellow,
Though festooned with enough Bondo and duct tape
To make it difficult to tell
Where car began and slapdash repair ended)
Strolling toward the deserted ticket window
To drop the two-bucks per for upper deck seats,
Knowing that we would find amenable ushers
Willing to let us move down to the boxes
After it became fully apparent
There was no last-minute influx scrambling off the 7 train,
And we sat in the sun-drenched field level seats
(Though its warmth a relative thing,
The rays’ angle and the decidedly April wind
Requiring buttons to be snapped
And collars to be turned upward)
Viewing the spectacle of two clubs
Dutifully and somewhat optimistically
Performing the rites of Spring, each nine knowing
There would be no October heroics in their futures,
Their first-rate plays and foibles
Gathering our appreciation or scorn
Between gulps of over-priced watery beers,
And as we sat in this unlovely stadium,
Looking for all the world
Like some Bunyan-esque chipped ashtray
Plopped down on an unprepossessing landfill
(The hopes and wistful dreams of this children’s game
Perched uneasily atop ancient sardine tins and discarded rattles)
We agreed that we would do this again,
But it never came to pass, as life its ownself
Rolled on like the cap of John Pacella
(Invariably flying off his unruly mop
From the effort of launching yet another fastball
In the all-too-vain hope it would find itself
Somewhere in the vicinity of the strike zone)
Tumbling brim over crown in the swirl of the breeze.

They built the thing in the wrong **** direction, you know.
The “sun field” being home plate, and come late afternoons
Every pitch a potential life-and-death experience
For hitter and catcher alike
(One young Mets farmhand, in a fit of sheer exasperation,
Actually came to the plate in full catcher’s garb.)
Still, it was—well, at least once a upon a time—just a short hop
From Pittsfield to The Show, and any old timer
Will gladly talk your ear off about how Kenny Brett,
Barely a year out of high school, don’t you know,
Went straight from here to The Impossible Dream
(Though Kenny, so improbably young in all their memories
Is long since dead now, gone like the boom-times
Before GE shut down,
Leaving nothing behind but poisons in the Housantonic.)
That is all memory, though, the park’s fortunes
Fading hand-in-hand with the city’s,
Inhabited by low-level minor league clubs
Where one player a summer
Might get his Crash Davis moment in the sun,
And later indie-league teams with kids and hangers-on,
All barely good enough to dream.
Now there is only a summer league for low-ceiling college kids,
The old wooden grandstand,
Still standing out of some implausible stubbornness
(Last living World War One veteran,
Some local lifer will invariably say, cackling and spitting
Though their ranks thinned each year
By the siren song of trailer parks in Orlando and hip fractures)
Now dotted with a group of locals,
Quirky minor-league aficionados and a cluster of area scouts,
Who, on the odd occasion of something noteworthy on the field,
Will make a show of pulling out a stopwatch or radar gun
(Though they are aware they are here
With the lowest-common-denominator expectations,
Looking for organizational types,
Middle relievers and fifth outfielders to fill out rosters)
But most of the time, they simply huddle together
Talk quietly,speaking in inaudible tones
The words of some dead and inscrutable language.

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

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

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

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

It was tossed in a corner of Bobby Lee’s garage,
A length maybe a couple feet long
And pretty frayed up as well, like it had been strained
By some job that it hadn’t been designed for.
In any case, it was clearly pretty **** useless
Fit for nothing outside of a garbage bag,
Though that was apparently out of the question;
It had come to his dad’s possession through his uncle,
Who’d been a deputy sheriff over in Blount County
And, according to Bobby Lee’s father,
Man was fat, stupid, and mean even by deputy standards.
In any case, Bobby Lee had tossed in the trash,
And when his father discovered it missing,
Came as close to giving the boy a hiding
As Bobby Lee could ever remember,
And when he’d protested that it was good for nothing,
Not worth keeping for any reason, his father had answered,
(Rather quietly as Bobby Lee remembered)
Boy, there’s things I’d rather not remember,
And things I **** well won’t forget.

We know
the old adage:
he who plans, He who laughs.
Pray the laugh's not too bitter and
mocking.

The fifteen-seater bounced and bobbled on the landing strip
(The arrival delayed a touch, as the single runway
Required one more scrape by the snow plow)
Coming to a more-or-less steady stop
For the brief but brisk and uncovered walk
To the crackerjack-box terminal,
Then, after the requisite tears and hugs,
Tumbling into the back seat of the ancient family truckster,
Driving in the dark past those houses and convenience stores
You assumed were still there,
Those changes to the lay of the land
(Subtle to those still around, downright abrupt
To folks who’d cast their lot elsewhere)
A thing resigned to the light of day,
And after the catching-up small talk
Devolved into the realm of the awkward,
You’d ducked out to head for the Cow Palace,
(The entrance to the bar still festooned with the sign
You must be this tall to drink at the bar,
Probably in its third generation of half-kidding)
For the just-a-couple-but-several-times-over,
Catching up on the particulars
As to who’d hooked up,
Who was no longer a couple
The general goings on in their circle
(But something lost in the translation,
Certain names not coming to immediate mind,
Certain nuances which now escaped him)
And come closing time they’d settled up
Then piled into Cully Scott’s ancient Lincoln
Eight of them all told,
Drunk as lords and high as kites,
Beyond legal or spiritual redemption,
Somehow not barging through some guard rail
And straight into the Kinzua Creek,
Pulling up to his front door just shy of four A-M.
He’d navigated to his room,
Which was spinning more than just a touch,
And when Sunday morning came,
His parents were unable to rouse him
(They’d half-jokingly checked for a pulse)
So they buttoned, zippered and scarfed themselves
In a manner befitting a bright but brisk January morning,
One of those days which moved you to opine
That it looked lovely from the warmth of the couch,
And as his parents departed for a warmed-over sermon
(Preacher’s handiwork endlessly re-cycled, after all;
Likely all involved able to repeat it word-for-word)
He’d remained under mounds of covers,
(Fast asleep, though he’d later remember
Beingly vaguely cognizant of the bells
Calling the faithful to services)
Sleeping the sleep of those
Resigned to lesser, somewhat intermittent epiphanies.

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

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

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

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

(AUTHOR'S NOTE:  This is a re-post of an older piece, but I am inexplicably fond of it, so I thought it warranted being on the line to air out once more.)

This most silent of silent nights
Was no different from any which had come before it,
Nothing at all to mark it as extraordinary or sacrosanct:
The village had long since stopped putting up decorations,
(Lights featuring jolly snowmen and steadfast wooden soldiers,
Now faded, cracked, with ancient and capricious wiring
Impossible to replace and impractical to repair)
Those old enough to harbor warm memories of caroling
Having long since wintered in some southern locale
Bearing Spanish names of dubious authenticity,
Those left behind by circumstance or stubbornness
Very likely slouched behind a cash register or un-crating paper towels,
The Wal-Marts, Kinneys, and Price Choppers,
In a shotgun marriage of customer service and rank capitalism,
Staying open a bit later every year,
Though at least providing the unanticipated benefit
Of one less hour to fret over things unbought,
One less hour to dwell upon promises unmet.

There is some solace, perhaps, in the notion
That the good times were only so good, after all
(It’s been said when the great ditch connecting Albany and Buffalo
Was finally completed, you could already hear train whistles,
Shrill and of ominous portent, in the distance)
And as Barbara Van Borland,
Thrice-married and eternally hopeful,
Opined from her perch at the Dewitt Clinton House,
If you’re gonna fall, better offa stool than a ladder.
Perhaps there is a certain mercy in laboring under the yoke
(Allegorical, but securely fastened all the same) of knowing
That we should expect little and prepare to make do with even less,
That these hard times are the only times we can expect to know.

How, then, do we carry on?  
Follow Pope’s dictum, one supposes,
And say your lines and hit your marks
With as much conviction as can be mustered
As we walk through this land of shuttered country schools,
This forest of plywood and concrete,
Where shoots of grasses and patches of weeds
Rise up through crevices and faults in the neglected blacktop
(But ride out on the back roads of the other side of river,
Out toward Cherry Valley, say, or Sharon Springs,
And see the wide panorama of the valley below,
The hills gently, gradually sloping upward to the Adirondacks,
Creating a vista which would make Norman Rockwell blush,
And you would say My God, how beautiful
If it didn’t seem foolish to give voice to something so patently obvious)
Until that time we are carried gently to that plot
Where we shall lie down next to our parents
In the newer section of the cemetery
Sitting hard by the edge of the sluggish Mohawk,
Where the remnants of by-products
From dormant farms and long-closed tanneries
Mix with the residue of hasty abortions
And the bones of forgotten and un-mourned canal mules.

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

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

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

He’d found himself restlessly housebound
(All men being the creators of their own comfort,
As well as the progenitors of their confinement)
And as the snow was on the lighter side,
Though tending toward the wet as well,
The type which renders the sidewalks in the town below
A bit, as the local parlance would have it, on the slippy side,
But his boots had sturdy uppers and decent tread,
And a walk this time of year less threatening than most,
What with the bobcats napping at midday
And the timber rattlers under the frost line for the winter,
The only threat to his well-being the potential discovery
Of some heretofore unseen red-ribboned stakes
Announcing the intention of some new **** fool
Who, in service of some desire to get closer to Mother Nature,
Was seeking to build in some spot
Where she offered him little more
Than a future of cracked foundations
And wind-sheared roofing misadventures.
Fortunately, his stroll was uninterrupted
By such man-made foolishness, his reverie undisturbed
Until such time as he happened upon a whitetail doe
Seemingly caught between flip and fly,
Her ilk all somewhat more comfortable
With their human counterparts
As they lived more cheek-to-jowl,
(But black-powder season had just ended a couple of days back,
So a certain skittish wariness was to be expected.)
He’d raised his hands in a gesture of what he supposed
Was non-threatening, knowing such a thing to be utter foolishness
Even as he raised his arms skyward,
But the beast backed away slowly, haltingly,
Before turning and cantering off,
And he figured that made it as good a time as any
To head back down toward the house,
Not to mention the snow had picked up in intensity,
A grainy, sleety issue which had filled in his footprints,
Leaving them barely perceptible in the waning daylight.

We do not, perhaps, expect the very sky
To descend upon us, all chunks and wedges
As it did upon the simple, deluded chick
Of the nursery rhyme of long ago
(A child’s verse, perhaps, but promulgated and purveyed
By those older, perhaps wiser, yet still wholly unable
To shake the terror of the meteorological and inexplicable.)
We have, as we have aged,
Eschewed the black-and-white of childhood cosmology
In order to make our gray-tinged bargain with the heavens,
Asking not for its benediction,
But content ourselves with negotiating
For a lack of outright malevolence,
And though our rationality tells us
It cannot come down on us chock-a-block and helter-skelter,
We nonetheless study the sky with wariness
Poorly cloaked as studious indifference.

The truck was crushed and dented
Almost beyond recognition
When the county boys reached the scene
(Though, as one of the deputies remarked,
Having seen the vehicle tottering around town
For virtually all his born days
Still ain’t much worse than when it started)
Apparently having slid off the Stamford Road
Then down the embankment
Where it had made an unhappy embrace
Of a utility pole near the old Ulster and Delaware tracks,
A rather unhappy ending to what had been
An arguably equally unhappy existence,
Though old Doc Benner had surmised
The junkman had probably been dead
Before the truck had made the shoulder,
Or so he had said at the graveside service
(He being one of the three or four in attendance
Feeling that one who’d been a common thread
In the existence of so many for so long
Should not go without some commemoration
In this already frayed-at-the-edged little town)
And he remarked that the old man had once told him,
When the doc noted the old saw
That one man’s trash was another’s treasure,
The main diff’rnce ‘tween trash and treasure
Is just a matter of expectation,
And it would have been most poetic if,
After the reverend’s perfunctory hand-off to the Almighty,
The clouds had broken and a thin shaft of light
Had fallen upon the junkman’s stone,
Or perhaps a gentle rain commenced
To heal the disturbed sod,
But the skies remained a slate-gray truculence
As the sexton’s ancient pickup tottered away,
The ropes and shovels tossed higgledy-piggledy
Under an ancient and somewhat watertight old tarpaulin.

Perhaps, dearest daughter, your continued absence
From these shores is very much a blessing
For even though your corporeal self
Resides an all but incomprehensible
Number of leagues away,
The occasional missive you deign to send
Serve as sufficient understudies for your particular role;
Indeed, one can almost feel the spittle
Rising as blunt instruments from the very pages themselves,


But then again, perhaps it is not so;
Not the odd angry recrimination
Sundry maddening, shrieking tales of woe
Blows which may not reach their destination
Though intended to mar the tend'rest spot
For even if perchance they reach their mark
These scattershot parries are all for naught,
For no matter what pains the barbed tongue bring,
The most **** pointed speech will fade in time;
Though slaps or scratches may utterly sting,
Such violence is not the ultimate crime.
'Tis the lack of your voice, or your foot-fall
Which is the unkindest cut of them all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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