As architecture, as artifice
It was an impressive entity, indeed
Rising several stories in height,
The winds at its top leading it to flutter
In such a manner as there was considerable debate
As to the identity of the visage at the apex,
Though there was no doubt that the edifice
Was majestic as it stood implacably *****,
Its folds billowing in an inscrutable silence,
And if one were to inquire as to its origins
Or the nature of the scaffolding it rested upon,
Such questioning was curtly dismissed
As irrelevancy of an unworthy and secular nature.

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

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

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

We'd referred to it as The Avenue,
Not because it had any pretense of being
Some major thoroughfare
(Indeed it ran for no more than a half-dozen blocks
From the traffic circle at the school building,
Itself de-commissioned for some years now,
To the small bluff at the end of the village
Where buildings ended and trees and fields began,
The view, in our childlike perspective,
What we assumed belonged to the birds and angels)
But because every other roadway
Had been christened with the more plebian "street",
And as the longest and straightest pavement
It was the venue for racing bicycles, skateboards
And anything else with wheels,
(As we later discovered, much to our parents' chagrin)
And certainly we had sent any number of bugs and beetles
To their makers in our mad rush
To reach the road's crest,
And on one horrific occasion, a tiny bird,
Barely past the point of being nurtured in the nest,
Somehow became enmeshed in my spokes
To be flung unceremoniously to the roadside,
It's wings splayed out in a manner
At once almost seraphim-like, yet clearly signaling
That the hatchling in question
(Its species not fully apparent--a pigeon, perhaps,
Or a mourning dove not destined to be part of a pair)
Would never take flight.
I'd looked at it, stunned beyond word or action,
When Nicky Gesters pulled up next to me,
Whispering into my left ear, Nothing to be done, kid.
Happens all the time.  If it wasn't you, woulda been some cat.
And, bereft of any rationale of my own,
I simply nodded, riding back down the *****
Not to return to the high end of the road for some days,
And when the time comes where some errant wheel,
Something rapacious and feline, or some other tool
Of life's winds and wuthering take me to my rest,
I hope to retain sufficient grace to seek out that bird
To proffer my regrets for my all too extant humanity,
My sad and insufficient pentinence.

He had not, the general consensus decreed,
Held up his end of the bargain;
Custom dictated that, once one had received
If not full absolution, a degree of dispensation
It was incumbent on the recipient
To acknowledge of the communal munificence,
Preferably with a suitably hang-dog expression,
And then move on with one’s life
In a sufficiently distant locale.
The gentleman in question had begged to differ
And stayed on, not simply long enough
To say the odd quick goodbye, to tie up loose ends,
But for the long haul, as he was born and bred in these parts,
Man and countryside one and the same,
Inextricable from one another, in his view,
And so he carried on about his business
As would befit a full citizen of the borough,
Occasionally stopping to pass the time of day
With the small circle of family and friends
Who had not found his particular peccadillo
As grounds for a de facto shunning
(Indeed, the wheres and whyfores of his particular transgression
Long past being generally agreed upon)
Continuing to shop, work, and even attend mass at St. Marinus
(Where he invariably had a pew to himself)
Where local legend had it that the statue of Jesus had once wept,
Though one former parish priest had noted
How the effigy was strangely and unnervingly impassive

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

What God has put asunder, I have joined together.
He chuckles at this somewhat self-consciously,
His clientele comprised primarily of gentlemen of a certain age,
Most of whom have stepped off to the altar
Twice or thrice, some even more,
Whose wives will be, at least pro tem,
The mistresses of the Moorish bastardizations
Being commissioned by their husbands,
Vaguely Iberian grotesqueries
Christened Sin Cuidado and Villa Tranquilla
Festooned with cornucopias of cornices and cupolas,
Featuring vaulted cathedral ceilings and open-prairie floor plans,
Impossible to cool in the ninety-degree dawn of August
Or heat during the all too frequent cold snaps,
(Such being noted to him by a visitor
From a staid Boston architectural firm,
To which he replied, Save that for the classrooms, pal.
I give the people what they want, dad,
And these folks are first, last, and forever
All about the façade.)

It is not, however, his effort to turn Florida’s East Coast
Into a giant movie set for the stories of Don Juan or El Cid
Which inspires him to utter his inversion of the marital vow.
He has moved beyond being a mere designer;
He is a man of substance, a builder in the larger, cosmic sense,
And so he is here, in this sticky, sweltering venue
Which disappointed Spaniards named after a rat’s oral cavity,
To make a new Venice, complete with electric gondolas,
Cloisters which would put any in the Old World to shame,
Gesturing, bellowing, and cajoling,
A Prospero of sawhorses and steam shovels,
As displaced Seminoles and colored laborers
Sweat and swear and stumble
As they dredge swamps and hack down stumpy mangroves
In the service of his vision, the aggrandizement of his bottom line,
Arm-twisting the caprices of drought and hurricane
To serve the pricier whims
Of a gaggle of DuPonts and Wanamakers.
It’s not that I don’t believe in a higher power, he will demur,
I’m simply not averse to some slight enhancement of His plans.

All of my formal training, all of the years
Of study and sacrifice to hone my craft,
Failures and frustrations that brought me to tears…
I think of how I scoffed at sell-outs, and laughed
At the mere suggestion that I too would chase
The almighty dollar and forsake my art.
Ah, but now…it is painful to view my face
In the mirror, seeing one who plays the part
Of the simple buffoon, the mere one-note clown
Sent to warm up the rubes for the main event,
Performing rude pratfalls to bring the house down,
Animated reminders of my descent.
And now, my vocation a mere joke, bereft
Of merit or value, I exit, stage left

It wasn't that he didn't remember the lay of the land;
Hell, knew it as well as his own name,
(Even though, he noted with some disquiet,
The pavement had crept a bit farther up Bootjack Hill,
And there was a driveway or two,
Not to mention the odd electric meter,
That hadn't been there some years before)
But there were considerations now,
Things which needed to be taken into account
Which, in his days of rattle-assing in these hills
In his third-hand '75 Nova
(Last of the Rochester straight-sixes,
As so many bottles and cans raised in tribute noted
Before he sold it to some kid from the neighborhood
For fifty bucks, probably forty more than it was worth.)
Had been under his radar, if not beneath his contempt,
But he wasn't driving a beater with a cracked manifold now,
And his hips and knees were less than amenable
To changing a tire on a narrow strip
Of packed dirt and gravel,
And if you moved at more than a snail's pace up there,
You could bust a brake line in short order,
And if even you could walk to a point
Where you had cell service,
You had to convince someone from the garage in town
To send someone up to those hills
(He could just imagine someone on the other end
After an incredulous pause saying
You up where, now?)
And he'd decided to tuck his car
Into one of those **** new driveways
(He'd have just K-turned it back in the day,
But he knew those culverts were deep and serpentine)
And headed back downhill,
Reaching the Irish Settlement road
(Itself only paved completely back in '84 or so)
The drone of the tires on the tarmac
Faintly irritating and mosquito-like.

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

And so there are things all about us,
Fine things at that:
Hills, perhaps gently rolling, perhaps ending abruptly
Courtesy of the ministrations of some indifferent glacier
Rolling in and then receding with equal diffidence,
The song of some unseen child singing inaudible lyrics,
All tinkling-bell-a-twitter,
Some grand art nouveau city tower,
Festooned with angels on the balusters, gargoyles in the cornices
And they are wondrous indeed,
All with their own histories to relate,
But imbued with the regrettable tendency
To all speak at once, with no inclination to await their turn
Leaving us flummoxed and forlorn,
Shorn of any way to glean what would be precious
From the ore of babble,
But there are those with a certain ear, a certain eye
(Though such eyes may be accompanied by lenses
Thick as the headlight on some ancient VW microbus,
Perhaps without even such limited acuity)
Who can sort such tangles, weaving them together
In such a manner where this cacophony
Becomes something greater than the sum of its parts,
New yet familiar, things we know as true,
As must be true, their presentation to us
Signaled by nothing more than a mere clearing of the throat,
The rustling of some smple garment,
And at such a moment we must proceed
All openness and open to all things
And thence govern ourselves accordingly.

It is rather unremarkable,
Or at least as so as such a pane may be,
Depicting a trinity not mentioned in Scripture,
Though their handiwork would likely merit approval
From any member of the trio cited therein,
As they went forth humbly,
In humble carriages in service
Of an ostensibly prosaic task
But certainly on the side of the angels,
As must have been noted
In each of their respective services
(Closed-casket affairs, one presumes
Given the state of the remains
After they were extracted
From the earthen dam site where they were discarded)
And their particular Caiaphas
Dispensed with sending their cases onward
For further consideration
(He too a man of the cloth, but also a mill operator,
Producing two-by-fours worthy of use on Calvary)
And after he had passed sentence,
Leaving matters to take course,
One assumes he went home, washed up
And made his usual rote recitations
Asking for Him to watch over his and his ownself.

James Sebastian Middlemarch was a prodigy.
No other way to say it in truth,
And those who knew him and his gift
Were in agreement that he was destined to reach
The apogee of the musical world,
Though he, even at a very young age, discouraged such talk,
Sometimes offhandedly, but at other times
Quite insistently indeed, for, even then,
He had the constant, gnawing suspicion
That there was a disconnect between the harmonies
(Mad, excruciating, yet unspeakably lovely)
Which scampered unfettered around his head
And those he could bring forth on the piano or viola.  
Nonetheless, his aptitude pulled him along
Through longitude and latitude,
To Julliard, then Paris and Vienn, maixing with others
Marked by their provincial peers as The Next One.  

Through all this time,
The sonatas, concertos, and full-blown symphonies
Danced on in his mind without restraint or retreat
Yet, when he tried to corral them onto paper,
They kicked and bucked and spit out the bit
In spurious sixteenths and turgid quarters
Which cantered along in pedestrian time signatures.  
These pieces (the “sad imitations”, as he called them)
Were performed on more than the odd occasion,
But on smaller stages by undistinguished orchestras,
And those freelancers dispatched by features editors
In the Rochesters and Pensacolas of the world
(Small-timers themselves, yet wholly without sympathy)
Would cluck and sigh dismissively in their reviews
That the works were derivative,
With easily discernible bits of Strauss and Schumann
(Clara Schumann, according to one acerbic small-town wit)
Scattered here and there,
And they were unanimous in their belief and opinion
As to the minor nature of his presence on the musical landscape.

After some years, he stopped publishing his works
Which made him even less of an afterthought
Than he had been at his low-slung zenith.  
He continued to play with some regional symphonies,
Where he was deeply loved by his colleagues,
As he was modest in the face of praise,
But never sparing in dispensing kindness in return,
And to all appearances the frenzied siren airs
Which had ridden roughshod over his psyche for so many decades
Had ceased at last, but after his death, one of his sons discovered,
Squatting surreptitiously under a mound of ancient antimacassars,
Several trunks containing untold scores of sheet music,
(Updated versions of earlier work,
New pieces abandoned in exasperation)
Which sat in mute testament to the difficult labor
Of unfastening onself from the yoke of being ordinary.

It's said,
On Christmas Eve,
The animals gain speech,
But they won't waste it on the likes
Of us.

I have garnered such wealth as I have
Through, if I may be so bold as to say so,
A preternatural ability to observe and catalogue
The foibles and follies of my fellow man
(This hard-won sagacity not the product
Of what I have learned as much as
The sum of what others do not know of themselves)
Yet, even though I believed
I had plumbed the very depths of absurd behaviors,
The prospect of kings--no, more than that,
Kings among kings-- bearing gifts
And complete fealty to some rank infant
Rudely swaddled and propped upon damp straw
Has brought even myself to bafflement.
Understand, the charms of children
(And the commensurate commercial usefulness)
Are not unknown to me,
But they are mercurial, undependable beings,
As ephemeral as the light of stars
Which allegedly acted as a guide to that trio of sovereigns
As their retinues crossed sand and savanna
(I sometimes chuckle to myself at the notion
That perhaps unwarranted clouds
Could have obscured the object in question,
And that the triumvirate could yet be
Wandering, searching, ruminating in vain)
Such intangibles are nonsense, of course;
Mere fol-de-rol entertained by those
Who would disdain the heft of solid coin,
The grit of good sand and dirt
Providing the assurance of good footing
As one saunters across the landscape
Upon such a night as this,black and unilluminated
As the aftermath of death itself.

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

She had, to be fair, a rather nice voice,
Pleaant in a steamy-shower-and-church-choir sort of way,
So it hadn’t been simply empty patter on his part
The opportunistic language of courting
(Though there was no shortage of that,
But she’d recognized it as such, writing it off
As something she’d deal with later)
And so she would serenade him,
Softly if not just simply humming,
In one of the common rooms
Scattered about the cold cow college they attended,
Or some bench on campus
During the fleeting bits of summer or spring
The land enjoyed before the earth locked-up for the winter,
And later still after the requisite preambles
Involving showers of rice and self-conscious dancing,
Gaily tossed garters and force-fed cake,
Her voice retaining its amiability,
Though often for her sole enjoyment,
As there were late meetings and flat tires,
Out of town conferences and overdue notices,
And in time those nattering bits and bobs
Which required their presence in separate locales
Seeped under the same roof,
Their dinners together brief gulped-down affairs,
The evenings spent in separate rooms
Perched in front of separate screens,
The chasm only breached by infrequent *******
(The process either perfunctory expressions of guilt
Or hopelessly frenetic and ultimately empty)
And she would often don a set of headphones,
Pulling up playlists of the old songs,
Though there seemed to be an emphasis
On those tunes of a rather minor key.

We hadn’t seen it for a couple years,
The film being a bit difficult to watch
Without dropping a few bucks
To stream it in all its black-and-white glory,
(A prospect which would have brought a grim smile
To a certain white-haired small-town banker)
Our laser disc scratched, our VCR beyond obsolete,
But there have been enough viewings
That certain tableaus
(Flower petals strewn, the glycerin tears)
Remain as familiar as the views out the front door,
And so on a whim we drove up to the quaint burg
Which espouses its claim to be Capra’s inspiration
With a tenacity which belies the season
(Though one look at the bridge which sits astride
A wan offshoot of the Erie Canal
Is sufficient for a startling bit of déjà vu)
Finding ourselves by ourselves in a restaurant
(The times after all, and it a weeknight to boot)
Surprisingly open, even though the town fathers
Had opted hopefully to decorate, as per usual,
The village streets to be as Bedford Falls-esque as possible,
And as we sipped our soup and munched our salads
We mused on how wonder and anxiety
Could walk hand-in-hand
(As we did on the way in and again on the way out)
And though our laughter was a soft, muted thing,
It tinkled in the manner of such things
Which enabled seraphim to gain their wings.

You’ve got to be kidding, she said,
Having moved past nonplussed to outright incredulous.
She was, at least in retrospect, not alone,
As we were there, just the two of us,
Having walked up Bootjack Hill
Past the derelict and defunct mills,
Past the equally moribund old middle school,
All the way to the old section of the cemetery
(Rarely mown and less rarely visited,
The markers and obelisks commemorating families
Who, though the names were vaguely familiar,
Had few branches of the familial tree in the area,
And those that remained were generally not of a mind
To see how relatively prosperous and glorious
Their clans had once been.)
She was not a slave
To the disingenuous and de rigueur demureness
Called for in that time and place,
Where a failure to register
A pro forma protest at a cupped breast
Brought suspicion among one’s peers,
And any attempt to navigate
Anywhere near or beneath ones *******
Required an ostentatious and woefully insincere passing out
So the next day could be greeted with beatific and virginal smiles.
She’d not kept faith with such notions, and so here it was
(The big It, the Holy Grail of Its) being offered up on a platter,
But I hesitated, hemmed and hawed, not so much from nerves
(Though they were there, understand,
My pulse ramped up it such a manner
That it played a Babalu which Ricky Ricardo would have envied)
Nor lack of preparation, as my wallet contained a ******
That was reasonably new-ish and theoretically dependable.
It just doesn’t seem right, I stammered in protest,
It’s just wrong somehow, disrepectful mebbe.
She’d looked at me, her face a mask of beyond disgust,
And though her eyes bespoke of soliloquies and angry sonnets,
She simply spat out And these poor **** stiffs got here how?
I’d said nothing in reply, stuck in some adolescent morass
Where I was neither flip nor fly.
At which point she’d fixed me with a look
Residing in some interval between disgust and pity,
And, having ascertained there was no hope for the likes of me,
Simply grunted Oh for chrissakes, just walk me home,
You ******* country-*** bumpkin,
And we trundled unsteadily unsteadily back toward town,
Footsteps hesitant on the long, unkempt grass,
Dew-soaked now that the procession of dusk
Had reached the doorstep of night,
The quarter-lighted shadows making the stones indistinguishable
From snakes, rabbits, and other living things.

Our Sweeney nurses his Falstaff,
Joining his hail-and-well-met fellows in mirth
This man of hearty life and laugh,
His fingernails rife with the stuff of earth and labor.
Outside, the moon’s reflection
In the sluggish and slatternly Canisteo
Is a portentous dot-and-dash thing,
Its light here-and-gone
As incongruous evening thunderheads,
Great wavy pompadours rolling off the big lake out west,
Growl sullenly as they move through;
Sweeney pays them no mind, as he has other fish to fry,
Regarding a frowzy pair from the sisterhood of round heels,
One of whom, catching his glance,
Crosses the room, mounting his lap and mussing his hair,
Purring ‘Jus wanna see how your lap feels, Hon.
At which she falls on the floor
(But softly, in the manner of an old campaigner)
Thereafter taking a moment to pull her skirt up just so
To adjust a stocking (black, with a run or two on display)
As her compatriot stands nearby,
Making calculations and considerations,
And with a barely noticeable nod to her co-conspirator
The pair head to the bar
While Sweeney, grinning the grin
Of a toreador expectant of victory and its spoils
Rises to join them and, just as suddenly, pauses,
Perhaps cognizant of the old poker saw
That if you look about the table
And can’t figure out who the mark is, it must be you,
Or perhaps it was the ringing of the bells on the hour
From Our Lady of the Valley
(Normally inaudible inside the tavern,
But the wind had made an odd swing to the southeast,
Allowing the chimes to occasionally outshine the jukebox)
Or perhaps something else intangible, inscrutable,
But in any case Sweeney bids his congregants
A hasty farewell as he saunters to the doorway,
Exiting into the humid, fecund evening,
And as he negotiates the sidewalk homeward,
He notes the odd evening singing of birds,
Their songs, even though he is part and parcel
Of this small city and its streets to his marrow,
Unfamiliar to the point of bafflement.

We raise them well enough to a point,
These children sprung from our fancy and gray matter,
But they often prove unruly and recalcitrant,
Immune to both wise counsel and outright admonition
And so we exile them to some corner
Until such time as they are willing
To acquiesce to cooperation and a certain conformity,
Where the remain as sullen accusations
And though we scorn them as obstinate failures,
We give into (at least, in our quieter moments)
The suspicion that their shortcomings
Lay much closer to home.

See that
under the cow?
That holds the stuff of life,
so pick it up and drink, just don't
kick it.

i.

There isn't much light when you're inside,
Or at least in terms of natural light,
And if you're looking for a star to guide you
Through your thirty days, you're even more out of luck
Than you were getting here in the first place,
(In my case appropriating--almost-- a turkey breast
The Saturday after Thanksgiving,
Figuring no tired, overworked checkout girl
Would ever miss it; **** poor luck, nothing more)
The windows too narrow to climb out,
Too high to smash in anger or frustration.
Still, you can catch a bit of the outside world
The sky (this once, at least) more blue
Than mid-December has any right being
In this grubby, hardscrabble corner of northwest P-A,
***** old lake to the west,
Endless logged-out hills to the east,
Never-quite-boomed mill towns due south,
Up north Indian land where bootleggers and number-runners
Holed up once upon a time, the Senecas
Now having gone legit, Beach Boys and Barbara Mandrell
Fronting shell games which bear the Feds' seal of approval.
This is the Galilee to which I shortly return.

ii.

Time gets syrupy in the hole, moving slowly, lazily,
Fighting the laws of Newton and Einstein at every turn,
And when the ******* about lawyers,
The oft-repeated and off-key done-me-wrong songs
And respectful if somewhat impatient
Supplications to Jesus for speedy deliverance
Are no longer sufficient distraction,
A man begins to think and remember.
I met Easy Terry E. (so he called himself)
In the city lockup in Troy, or maybe it was Schenectady
(I have, after all, mosied up and down the Eastern Seaboard,
On both sides of the bars)
And let me tell you, for the only time in my born days
I wished these small-city holding cells had solitary,
As Terry E. not only had a chalkboard-scrape falsetto
Which constituted aggravated assault on the eardrums,
But also a predilection for non-stop yammering
About nothing and everything, punctuating his blather
With frequent high-pitched insistence
That he was a hermaphrodite,
And he would frequently taunt the guards by yowling
Baby, I got a lady's equipment down here.
Maybe you want to strip search me, honey.
(Such high spirits led to an inevitable outcome;
I heard a jailer up in Utica decided to quiet him down
By sticking Terry's head in a toilet, the swirlie
Ending up a minute or two longer than was advisable)
But I had been able to more or less ignore him,
As to that point he'd concentrated on ******* off
Everyone in the cells with the exception of me,
But my turn came soon enough
Oh, don't worry Peter, darling, I know your type.
Different, smarter than the rest of us
He all but sang in  my direction.
Mebbe so, I grumbled, just a few fluky bad breaks
Here and there, that's all.
Terry laughed and clapped his hands,
Poor sweet thing, a victim of that old lousy karma.
There was a philosopher…
And he stopped for a moment,
Seemingly trying to pick a name from the air
(Not that he could see anything floating in front of him,
As he wore horn-rims with lenses as thick and opaque
As the headlights of a '72 Skylark.)
So you're just taking a break here until your luck turns, mmm?
I laid back against the wall,
Hands behind my head and grinned.
Yep, I replied, things are due and then some
To start going my way.
Terry giggled once more, Well, you've got things
All figured out then!
Good, evil, right, wrong--just snapshots of the roulette wheel
In some infinitesimal sliver of time, and all we can do
Is put our chips down and hope the croupier is playing it straight.
Well, now that you've finally figured all that out,
I suspect you won't see the wrong side of the bars again.
And with that he turned his back on me,
Paying me no mind whatsoever
Until they turned me loose the next morning
With the stern admonishment
To trouble the good citizens of the Capitol District no more,
And as I think back to that moment,
I suspect he may not have been telling the whole truth
As he saw it.

iii.

And so I will be released from this small cell
In this small red-brick building
In the midst of this equally small red-bricked town,
And I will bypass the bars
With their potential for a cheap hustle
And various types and flavors of low-hanging fruit,
And I will dispense with a seat on some sad Trailways bus,
Seeking a ride (thumb hopefully, defiantly
Pointing upward to the sky)
On the old Grand Army Highway,
Then north on the Buffalo Road
And I will clamber down the embankment
To the Kinzua Dam and, shedding socks, shoes, and clothing,
And hang the cold,
I shall wade into the water, acclimating ankles and washing feet,
The dive headlong under the water's surface
To arise cold, cleansed, ready to move onward.

One thought this is how London looked after The Blitz
Although there was no one's finest hour to be cited
Commemorating how these torched shells of buildings came to be,
Standing not in defiance as much as the indifference of gravity
To finishing a job better not left incomplete,
Given they were fit for nothing but rats and pigeons
(And they probably not without their misgivings)
But one night we were driving over to Jersey
To obtain grain alcohol or some other contraband,
I'd observed the odd single-bulb shining out of
What purported to be a windowless frame,
Misbegotten wished-upon stars
Failing to deliver upon the most prosaic of aspirations,
And that evening I'd drank with a taciturn fury,
My companions shaking their heads,
Saying For chrissakes, you're less ******* fun than usual.
Go the hell home, or haunt a ******' graveyard,
And I did not travel upon that highway again
Until I left The Island for good, grabbing a ride
From a friend who was a fellow native
Of the cold, cow country Upstate
And as we approached the Throgs Neck Bridge,
I turned away from the window, telling my buddy
I'm gonna grab some shut-eye; you can wake me
Once we hit the Palisades.

It’s a ******* good thing there’s no bouncers in church,
(Though your dad’s just the type who would bring in some thugs)
And the lack of an invite left me in the lurch;
All I wanted was one goodbye kiss and some hugs.
I suppose I should have laid off the Prairie Fire,
(Two parts Wild Turkey, and three parts Tabasco)
As the ***** and my broken heart served to conspire
To make the affair something of a fiasco.
It may have been short-sighted to **** in the punch,
Waving my Johnson around like King Arthur’s sword,
And I regret if it ruined the buffet lunch;
I’ve never been the type who liked to be ignored.
Your mouth opened to scream, but didn’t make a sound
(I’ll take that as a sign that you might come around.)

I remember, or at least believe I do
(The memories wispy, ethereal,
The stuff of dream or perhaps simple misapprehension)
How I would be half-asleep,
The pro forma repetition of bedside prayers in my head,
Asking for benediction for Grandma and Grandpa
And all the ships at sea
As my father would come home from his lodge
(I forget the mammal in question--****** or elk,
Or perhaps some fictional comedic excuse
Akin to Ralph Kramden's raccoons)
Singing at a volume he believed sufficiently soft,
Though my mother was quick to inform him otherwise,
And the tales of poor Tom Dooley
Or some unnamed tavern in the town
Would intermingle with the remnants of my supplications,
And they would synthesize as some code,
Some argot of some unknown in-crowd
Whose patter was beyond my ken.
My father's songbird days stopped quite abruptly,
And during the proceedings paying homage to that coda,
God was frequently cited, indeed summoned,
And I suspect he tottered earthward,
At which point he proceeded to absent himself
From my further consideration and commiseration,
And I came to such a time where hazy night-time songs
Were part and parcel of my routine,
Though more bourbon-fed than sleep-induced,
And when the talk turned to such things
As the pros and cons of one's patrimony,
I was wont to opine that I was the product of two fathers,
The bequests of whom tended to wax and wane in value.

It is a workaday task
Performed in the service of equally workaday people:
A bland smile, a benign greeting,
The quick review of hastily taken skeletal notes,
The fixing of the apparatus, an approximation of eyewear
Fit for some black-and-white-serial robot,
Upon sundry bridges of sundry noses,
And thence the reading of letters,
Done with an easy sure-footedness at first,
Then imperceptibly yet inexorably more hesitant
Until such time they are no long able
To decipher what is before them,
The shapes devoid of meaning,
Hopelessly beyond their ken,
And at such a time he begins to finagle lenses and settings,
Until such a time where the occupant of his chair
Regains equilibrium and pronounces his sight
Sufficient to the task at hand,
But there was one occasion when, inexplicably,
The patient stiffened in abject terror,
Relating in clipped, anguished words
That all he saw was light, nothing but light
Subsuming everything in its presence.
He was able to restore the lenses to such a fashion
Where the figures before him were reasonably familiar,
But as he excused the patient from the chair,
He found himself wishing ruefully
That he knew some grinder, some technician
Who could have fashioned eyewear
To the specifications which had elicited such a reaction.

She would never dream of arriving at a session
Looking like a first take--not like the bass player
With his shirt collar rising and rolling
Like some unplanted meadow on an Upstate hillside,
Or the trumpeter whose ancient corduroys
Have not seen a pressing in months if ever,
Or the sad young man at the mixing board
With the hair sticking out like wire brushes
Splayed for the softest swish possible.
She would never dream of appearing in any manner
Not fully together, the muted gold blouses
(Accentuated with a bright red scarf)
The tailored skirts of crimson or brown,
Hair freshly salon-coiffed, lipstick and makeup just so.
As she is not a performer as much as the stuff of legend,
And those hunched over traps and cymbals
Or bunched cheek-to-jowl with the acoustic tile
Are utterly bewitched by the sounds,
So familiar yet with all the life of twenty years earlier,
Yet the tape playback seems to file a dissenting opinion:
There is a certain frailty to the timbre,
The odd hitch and hesitation in the phrasing
(She does not betray much while listening,
One headphone pressed to a single ear,
Save for the odd fleeting furrow to the forehead)
But it is something that is paid little mind,
The quartet and singer plowing ahead
Until such time she gathers coat and purse
In a gesture which clearly states That is all for today
And she leaves the studio to walk the few blocks home,
Passing by some down-on-their-luck brownstones,
Their facades recently whitewashed in the vain hope
Of masking the irrevocable cracking in the walls,
The buckling of the edifice's foundation

Critics
were all grateful
the show "A Braying ***"
was not renewed for a second
season.

It was a trip which was essential, one supposes,
Though the notion that one must parse
Which forays into the outdoors
Require self-justification
(If we are short on milk, can one linger on
To peruse beer or chips, or gaze longingly
At the ground beef and chicken *******
Priced into the lofty realm of the luxury item?)
In the midst of this reverie upon the new regimen,,
I turned onto a side street, where I happened to see
A young girl dipping a small wand
Into a non-descript bottle,
And as the implement came forth,
Great globular soap bubbles appeared
Huge unrestrained things,
Floating onward and upward without care nor constriction,
And though the child was suitably masked,
It took no more than the quickest glance into her eyes
To know her smile was every bit as beatific
As any enjoyed by our mothers or grandmothers
Or any such progeny as may come to be
In what one hopes will be better times.

He had, when it became clear
The dog was on his last legs,
Went to a canine memorial concern,
One of those somewhat well-intentioned marketing brainstorms
Which operated under the assumption
That what was good enough for master was good enough for Fido,
And the folks who ran the place dressed in dark suits
Which accentuated the notion that what they did
Was no different than going through the paces
Of sending Grandma to her final reward
(Though the whole thing carried out
With a wink and a nod,
All of which by no means bringing credit to man nor dog.)
He'd been put off by the whole fol-de-rol,
Though he'd sat dutifully through the videos and brochures,
Being possessed of the same damnable politeness
Which made a place like this possible if not necessary,
And he'd ignored the two or three follow-up inquiries.
The dog finally came to his rest
On one of those gray silent November days
Which were the harbinger of the locking season,
And he'd taken him down to the back part of his property
Where he'd had the soybeans in this year,
A spot where three or four of his dogs already resided,
And though there was no markers or such on the spot,
He reckoned that the fact it was a good patch of growing land
Was sufficient testament to their standing.

Her woe is a workaday thing,
Not the product of catastrophic illness
Or some wanton random tragedy;
It is simply the occupation of a certain stratum,
A predetermined prank of birth,
A random assignation to such a place
Where the world is a middling mid-week place,
With no illusions of weekend soirees
At some overwrought bungalow on the coastline,
But she will, if such an opportunity presents itself,
Wander down to the narrow refuse-cluttered public beach
And remove her scuffed and patch-stained old sneakers,
Taking a few precious moments to sit by the water's edge
To bathe and soothe the soles of her feet.