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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 an undertaking to be done with some trepidation,
As the arrival of June-like warmth and sunshine
Can lead us to an unwise giddiness,
A disregard for what we instinctually know
Concerning the introduction of basil and succulents
While the spectre of an unwelcome late-season freeze
Lurks some days westward in Calgary or Winnipeg,
But this is mostly the grunt work
One puts in for preparation for summer's bounty,
The shoveling and hoeing and grunting
Which one performs with pro forma grunting and *******
There is a certain reflexive restoration in this task
Which belies our outward irritation
And though we cast the odd sideways glance
Toward the shadows at the back of the lot
Where rabbits and chipmunks
And other less tangible potential enemies lie in wait
There is a warmth which permeates marrow and memory,
A thing which recalls a child running
Through torrents of October leaves
Or sitting wordlessly with a loved one on the porch
Or any number of tableaus from this thing
Of worry and wonder.

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

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

It has been long since decommissioned and closed to traffic,
The borough choosing not to replace it,
Simply dead-ending the road at its foot,
And most of the populace, casting a wary eye
Upon the crumbling, moss-dappled abutments,
Deign it unwise to walk upon it as well.
He is there most every day,
Regardless of, and perhaps oblivious to,
The meteorological particulars of the moment,
January no different from June or November.
He is, on the odd occasion,
Not the sole visitor to the clanking anachronism:
There are children whom he regards
With a grandfatherly solicitude
Or a well-practiced gruff wariness,
Depending on the age and attitude of the cherub in question,
Young lovers treated with a studious indifference,
Allowing them time and space to trod their well-worn paths,
The occasional generational fellow-traveler,
Stopping by for a brief and mutually proscribed interval,
Each knowing one does not come to such places
For indeterminate and interminable idle chit-chat,
And in any case, they would know there things to be considered,
As he has married and buried,
Has celebrated his muted victories, mourned his plebeian losses,
Accepted his compromises and allowances,
And sometimes he will note the small plaque on one beam,
Noting the bridge's origin in New York's Finger Lakes,
Where benign glaciers made burbling inlets
Emptying into lakes which end up nowhere,
And he will find an odd comfort in the notion
That the sluggish brown old creek flows into the Clarion,
And thence to the Allegheny and Ohio
Likewise the Mississippi and onward to the ocean,
Part and parcel of all things once and forever, amen.

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.)

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

It would be fanciful to believe she wrote the odd couplet
In between exchanging gunfire with some state trooper,
Or knocked off a couple quick stanzas
While hotly pursued by some city police roadster,
Siren wailing and sidewalls straining.
Most likely, they were the product of the down times,
The doldrums between bank jobs,
A time to patch wounds and grab the odd forty winks,
Time given to reflecting upon what had transpired,
More likely that which lurked in some indeterminate future.

As to what lay between the covers
Of those dime-store notebooks
(One wonders how they were procured,
By coins fished from the bottom of some threadbare purse,
Or taken gratis, either brazenly or on the sly)
Their consideration has devolved
Into the love child of curiosity and notoriety,
To be imitated by devotees of her brief romp through history
Or sniffed at by the theses-laden as mere juvenilia,
Though they may grant her a certain if tentative feel for rhyme,
Perhaps acknowledge a joie de vivre in her lines,
But if one reads and perhaps reads again,
Something else comes forth,
A thing which some might argue marks the true poetess,
A rendering of the realization that one's life
Can be full or failure at twenty-three or eighty-three
And that the interval between the two
May or may not be preferable
To the brief flash of light, the brief yet excruciating sting
Which precedes the grim darkness.

These gatherings had become somewhat regular,
A short drive for most involved,
Having stayed behind once the mill closed
(There were the odd out-of-state license plates,
Mostly Florida and the Carolinas,
The vehicles' occupants sporting incongruous tans,
And they were treated with a certain reserve,
As if they had breached some faith,
Had broken some covenant)
And they were invariably in the morning,
Leading more than one wag to note
Well, at least we're all on first shift now.
And the talk outside of Wiegert's,
Shambling old funeral home a little more care-worn
With each generation of the family it fell to,
Turned to such things as Butchie's unusual good luck,
How he'd remained more or less unscathed by the mill,
Losing only the tip of a pinkie finger in a roller
(It was said that, back before the dining room
At the Montmorenci House
Had been converted into a tattoo studio,
You always shook hands with the left and right
To ensure a full set of ten fingers in the grip.)
And how he had, even though he was among
The most reticent of men, been a regular
At the retiree luncheons at the diner up in Wilcox
(The timing of such events subject to certain vagaries
As an infrequent February snow storm
Or the less uncommon changes in ownership)
And how he once explained his presence,
And then only when pressed,
By quietly noting Well, I figger my will-be's
To be a solitary thing, and the only folks
I share my used-ta-be's is all of you good people.

In his reveries, there is no furtive glancing around corners,
No skulking and scraping to hide from scowling gendarmes.
He is huge, *******, a proto-Kong of the wrong side of the tracks,
(Indeed, more than that—beyond the corporeal,
Something elemental, Master of Nature’s laws
Yet subservient to none of them)
Strutting down the boulevards and byways,
Marching through the very midst of graveside services,
Feasting on the floral tributes,
Fornicating with the freshly dug earth.
And he races onward, unconstrained and uncontrollable,
Forcing himself upon matchstick girl and street urchin,
Misusing them in horrible, unspeakable ways,
(His appetites creatures unto themselves,
Not subject by the boundaries of propriety or biology)
Taking for himself their sad collections of pennies,
Tossing them heavenward to rain down in a copper cacophony
Before he steals upon an unsuspecting bobby,
Slitting his throat and setting the corpse afire,
Proceeding then to urinate upon the ashes.
As these tableaus unfold in the nickelodeon of his sleep
(Not accompanied by some tinkling version of Hurry No. 26
Jangling uncertainly on some hayseed the-ay-ter untuned upright
But rather by some Dada-esque concoction
Bereft of consistent key or time signature)
He laughs unrestrainedly, bereft of cause or context
Without a trace of mirth or simple humanity.

They have always been among us,
Preening and parading through their brief tenure,
Those acolytes of taking their final bows
While safely in their prime,
Ensuring the photos and screen-shots
Scattered on walls and tables
At their memorial service
Are the remnants of an eternal if truncated youth.
I would (having passed such a time anyway)
Demur to embrace such a notion,
As such an exit strikes me as the final half-measure
In an existence comprised of nothing but,
The process of having left hearts a-flutter,
Cleaved in half yet never made whole,
The tales suitable for guffaws and back-slaps,
But invariably involving merely one protagonist.
I have looked in the mirror, and wanly recognized
The lined face, the thinning and graying patch
Topping that sad apparition,
And I have resigned myself to the notion
That, when I am a thing of the past tense,
My remembrance will be in quieter tones,
The attendees with faulty aortas and rebuilt hips of their own,
And though the anecdotes about my final years
Will be short on notoriety and things
Not subject to the statutes of limitations,
Let it be remembered that I not only loved,
But lived that love as the contented part of a whole,
And that, though those days were not raucous
Nor involved more than one end of a candle aflame,
That I squeezed every **** last bit
Of all that time and tide had allotted.

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.

He'd made what he'd believed the requisite sacrifices,
At least mildly painful but fully necessary,
Striving to keep a certain arm's-length objectivity
In order to carry out his craft
So that it was not tainted by sentiment,
Detachment serving as antiseptic,
In the hopes divining the purposes of God or whatever,
And thus giving it the proper exposition,
So he'd set about the process of finding some celestial thread,
Traipsing both interstate and back road,
Standing forlornly before crumbling Catskill hotels,
Abandoned bath-houses and resorts in Sharon Springs,
The sarcophagus-like state office building in Binghamton
(Hopelessly poisoned before it could ever be occupied,
Casting a baleful shadow over the city's ragged downtown)
The remnants of the Strand over in Ithaca,
Once beautiful lady of vaudeville
Now nesting-place-***-latrine for pigeons
Cooing and trilling at him insistently,
As if they spoke some code he must be able to cipher,
The sprawling auto graveyard
Cradled in the elbow-crook of an on-ramp in Cortland,
The black-eye front ends of ancient Buicks and Datsuns
A series of inscrutable crossword puzzle rows,
All of these things whispering intermittently to him
But providing no revelation, save a gut feeling
That the epiphany he sought was forever beyond him,
And in the mad act of a man beyond dejection,
He pulled his car into some sad rest area,
No more than a picnic table and a port-a-john,
Wandering over to the edge of the scrubby woods
Where teens fornicated and drunks urinated,
And pulled up a fistful of ragged flowering weeds
Pulling of the petals one by one
In the manner of some sad, jilted, loved-then-unloved juvenile
Contemplating how deeply he dwells among the forsaken.

The saving grace of unconventional beliefs
Is that they are usually held closely to one's chest,
Like a poker hand whose possessor
Cannot determine if it is advisable to bluff
Or simply fold and sacrifice the ante
But such reticence is an afterthought
Come the evening's third or fourth Buddy long-neck,
At which time restraint becomes a weakness,
A refuge for losers, and so one of his compatriots
Feels sufficiently emboldened (if not ennobled)
To lecture his fellow stool-mates
On the absurdity, indeed the very impossibility
Of the existence of some higher power,
Some sky-residing guiding principle,
How the whole house of cards
Tottered upon the rickety scaffolding of givens and assumptions
(Reminding him that his negation
Was dependent on a box set of if-then statements
Simply a fool's errand, as he was fully in the grip of mania,
Possessed by the bedrock of his faithlessness)
Not dissuaded by the bartender's admonishing
For chrissakes, Philly, maybe it's time for you to call it a night,
Mebbe go somewhere to tell some kids
There ain't no Santa Claus
So he decided to take his leave instead,
Nodding to those who chose to remain
For the graduate-level portion of Philly's lecture
As he stepped into the street to regard the calm nighttime,
Just the shaving of a crescent moon in the sky,
Hidden now and again by the passing clouds
Dotting and dashing the sky like some unknown cipher
And he considered the notion that all of this
Was the product of some random jumble,
Some rudderless happy accident,
But as he muddled upon the idea further,
He'd thought upon his own voyage
Undertaken with little aforethought to manning the tiller,
And, being all too familiar with the dreck and dross
Of letting things fall where they may,
He was unable to reconcile himself
To all of this being the upshot of happenstance.

It was an unornamented, workaday kind of place,
The type of hand-to-mouth concern
Scattered all through these not particularly grand towns
Tethered onto the old Grand Army Highway,
(Each interruption in the amalgamation
Of tight turns and gently stoop-shouldered hills
More or less the same, the only variation being
The extent to which the main drag was not what it once was)
A collection of the detritus and left-behinds
Of a place a comfortable preponderance of its denizens
Had found it prudent to leave in the rear-view mirror
Though the contents wherein more of a regional nature,
Old Duquesne beer signs and Penn State football programs,
Souvenirs such as Adelphia Cable jackets
Or 1954 Guaranty Paper calendars
Too painful or too precious to be put up for sale,
The edifice itself a gerrymandered concern,
Rooms created from dividers and acoustic wall panels
Yet unable to hide its giant single-room past
As some small manufacturing concern,
A machine shop or ancient tannery,
Telltale signs of ancient and abruptly capped plumbing
Incongruous fuse boxes and gas connections
Peeking out unobtrusively here and there.
We’d picked out a couple of bits and bobs,
Haggled respectfully but not aggressively
And swung the car back onto the main road
Heading west to Port Allegany,
Hoping to catch breakfast at a diner whose Yelp reviews
Lauded the quality of its corned beef hash,
Though we found the place shut tight,
A sign hopefully noting Temporarily Closed for Renovations
Yellow-taped and fading stuck fast to the front door.

Life its ownself is powerful fond of the long goodbye,
The process of moving from indispensable to incidental
An incremental trip of infinitesimal steps,
But the upshot is goodbye all the same,
And once upon a time everywhere was a warm and intimate place,
A universe of mobiles and appliqué on the walls,
Somewhere where you were all the comfort and confidante ever needed,
But the world went and got bigger
And though you thought you’d stayed the same,
Fidelity being your stock in trade, you’d become a lesser thing,
Privy to the grim notion
That affection can be genuine and expendable all at once,
And now you are outbound,
Gingerly ******* a coach-class ticket
To an uncertain destination,
And you suppose all things are possible now,
But that is all part and parcel of the cold realm of the probable,
And you rest the ticket in your lap, just to the left of the heart
That is hand-stitched on your rustic gingham
(The patch a bit faded and Hershey-stained now,
And one or two of the stitches are not as tight as they should be)
Which you suppose still beats, but only faintly enough
To be just a sad and mocking thing.

It stood on a mound, prepossessing in its own right,
But the height of the grim, unadorned steeple
And the tableau it cast when storms would roll in
From the cold gray waters of Lake Erie
Was somewhat intimidating to small children
And others predisposed to being dominated,
Though what awaited one within
Could be equally intimidating, if no more so;
Oh, there was the nod to brotherly love
And coming to God with a joyful noise,
But the occupants of the pulpit
(Invariably square-jawed, gray-maned older men
Whose visages were brewing maelstroms,
Incipient cloudbursts on the very precipice
Of drenching the insufficiently pious)
Left no doubt as to the serious of their mission,
And were equally up front as to the cataclysm
Which would rain down on the congregation,
The mills, the town and all those
Who proved insufficient in their piety,
And while there were questions
Concerning prescience and cause-and-effect,
Most of what they threatened came to be
(The Montmorenci Company shuttered and silent,
A sad procession of U-Hauls, all on one-way rentals
Tottering out of town after the muted goodbyes)
Though, as an unintended and unforeseen consequence,
Taking the church as well, its grounds now only visited
By mothers and small children
Clambering upon the playground equipment
The church begrudgingly installed
Shortly before it closed its doors for good,
And when the gunboat-gray clouds
Rolled on down from up near Buffalo,
They would hurry on home
As the droplets, relative leviathans
Slapping on the pavement as they scurried home,
Came at increasingly frequent intervals,
And though they could hear the rumbles of thunder
Grumbling with a certain portent as the storm moved closer,
Their procession, though quite brisk,
Was more unless unworried,
The adults knowing full well the downpours
Were merely succor upon the carrots and gardenias.