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

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 one of those fussy, fuzzy little epiphanies;
She’d noticed, a little surprised and nonplussed,
That her wedding ring sat on the window sill above the sink,
Its removal necessitated to scrub the assemblage
Of dishes and silverware facing her,
The act certainly of no particular significance in itself
Simple unconscious mechanics,
Like tying a shoe or a quick goodnight peck,
But a thing at one time unthinkable,
Akin to betrayal and other sorts of unimaginable treachery,
Involving the breaking of solemn covenants
Of undying affection and fealty
(Though such vows rendered impotent
By their very nature, their utter lack of recognition
Of life’s winds and wuthering)
When love was a thing close kin to sheer madness,
Hurtling onward without heed to caution or stoplight
(But such emotion also prone to falsehood,
A three-alarm call with mutual aid to boot,
All for some overwrought trash barrel or barbecue)
And she was stirred from such reverie
By his appearance in the kitchen with a late arrival of glassware
Proffered with a bit of a wan smile,
Which she accepted as sufficient apology,
Taking a moment to push the ring a bit more toward safety,
Away from the minor maelstrom of water
Rushing unheedingly into the drain.

Know this—I am well acquainted with the wolf,
Well versed in his ways, his demeanor,
His dispassionate relentlessness,
His pitiless focus on hunt and hunted,
His workaday disdain of pity.
There are those who would laud the mythical Spartan lad
Who hid the wolf beneath his cloak,
Affecting some gallant stoicism
As the beast consumed him without restraint,
But I say to you that is a mere romantic fallacy,
A wanton failure to apprehend the true moral.
I have learned that there is no accommodation,
No covenant to be reached with the wolf,
And any attempt to do so is merely to invite destruction,
And so I choose to engage him openly, without reservation,
Rolling tail-over-teacup in the streets,
Attempting to hold his jaws open with bare hands
While those who find such battle unseemly and uncouth
Jeer and hoot from porch and portico.
No matter, for I will continue to meet the cur on my terms,
For staid suffering in the hopes
Of reaching some accord with the beast
Is the not the act of the noble sage:
It is the mock heroics of the coward,
The sad acquiescence of the simpering fool.

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

Step lively, now, as good news is not of a mind
To wait upon delay and dithering
Nor to pay any heed to your day's peculiar grace
The ticket for your promised land
Is one-way only, and you need to clutch it
For all you are worth, and travel light;
If it don't fit in a paper sack, you don't need to take it along,
No need for any suitcase
Packed with your yesterdays, your Yes, ma'am,
Your No, sir, your Might I have my pay, sir?
Because your satin-shoes, lose-your-blues,
Done-paid your- dues day comes just once
And once only, so you best move with some dispatch, child.

And so I walk upon this stage of life
Set before this night of a thousand eyes
Sans players and bereft of drum and fife
My given charge to sift the truth from lies,
To extract from the ore of distant past
Some kernel of what the years ahead may hold
And though I know full well the die is cast
My gestures and speeches long since foretold
And I am content with the part I play
In this warhorse my fathers have composed
Though other dramas are now underway,
Sad and hackneyed things which I had supposed
Would proceed, my presence not required.
The director demurred when I sent regrets
And so that preordained was what transpired,
This life no stroll upon the parapets.

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.

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

He is unsure at this point if the soft pings and dings
Which inflict themselves upon his ears
Are courtesy of the wired-up grotesqueries
Stuffed cheek-to-jowl by his bedside
Or from the ubiquitous phone perched forlornly next to him
(Even at this stage, he has his inevitable newsfeed,
And he imagines he will be tagged in Facebook posts
Long after he has been exorcised
From the concerns of this workaday world)
Chronicled nattering of people
Tethered to him in the most tenuous of manners,
Or the fifteen or so seconds of flashing come-ons
Purveyed to capture what passes for our attention
On those three-inch billboards
Without which our very existence
Would have only the most speculative of meanings.

As he totters toward the final reckoning,
Remaining breaths perhaps few enough
To be counted upon his desiccated fingers,
He would, though he has nothing left to pawn,
No collateral left to barter upon,
Give all for just one more trip around the sun,
Even though he remains nonplussed by the notion
That we leave as we arrive,
Bereft of clues or whys and wherefores,
Not unlike those came before us,
Whose weathered and indecipherable stones
Stand as mute sentinels as some staid convoy
Brings our pitiable refrain to a full stop.

The clouds have piled up to the west once again,
Grave and solemn as ancient, inscrutable judges
As they roll off the lake out toward Buffalo,
Odd ciphering of dots and dashes
Camouflaged in the heat lightning,
The key to its code beyond our ken
(Though we suspect the message is straightforward enough:
No rain for your beans and sorghum tonight.)
We are steadfast in our belief that rain will come,
Indeed, that it must come, if for no more reason
Than our fathers believed it would come,
And their fathers before them as well,
No matter that it was a simpler time then,
And confidence and conviction simpler as well:
No maze of subsidy and acronym to navigate,
No peppers from Argentina, no corn from DuPont.

We have seen the grain markets roller-coaster and ricochet,
The price per hundredweight of milk crash in a manner
Which sent our citified ancestors strolling off window ledges,
And yet we continue (aided and abetted by the bank,
The co-op, the seed company, each of whom also knows
Exactly what the denouement entails)
The inexorable cycle of madness:
Plow, plant, harvest, then winters of regret
Until it is time to plow and plant again,
Each year the liquid manure smelling a bit more acrid,
Like there was some Gomorrah smoldering under the surface,
Its inhabitants blind, soulless, cackling at us
With something that may as well be malice.

How to carry on, then?
Surely we could not be blamed
If we rent our garments and rolled madly in the dust,
Cursing God or jabbering in tongues,
But that is not our way, has never been our way,
And so we face one more cold snap that takes the tottering lambs,
One more inconvenient frost which threatens the apples and grapes,
With antique stoicism and grimly set jaws
As we stare at one more darkening sky,
The thunder in the distance
All but issuing a mocking challenge to our fidelity,
In wait for some moisture, some meteorological baptism
That is far from certain to come.
It’s what leads us to faith,
So those who reside in the pulpits tell us,
Ascetic men who tip-toe through the barnyards and pastures
As though the cowflops were landmines,
But we could tell them that faith is no blank check
Which awaits us at the end of days,
But rather the grim and desperate struggle
To force our gods and demons into a box
And somehow secure the lid
As we simply try to ride it all down just one more ******* day.

And so you have come to this immutability,
Delivered by those forces, those fates
(Unseen, perhaps things of our own making,
Unshakeable in any analysis)
Complicit in our preordained rest and rust,
That which made that Ephesian,
Ruefully reading the eternal river
To see there was some eddy, some oxbow
Predestined as the end to his temporary journey,
Deposit his scroll in the great temple,
And such for all of us, then,
The marble chiseled and graven,
Final but for a few finishing touches,
The fate of all men, fated to dust yet invulvnerable,
Shadows brought to the precipice
Of such things which are inescapable
Yet chosen by us nonetheless.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Marriage is, the priest intones, sitting hunched over his desk
Like a card sharp trying to figure if he can fill an inside straight,
Not unlike love itself, the deepest and most beguiling of all mysteries,
And I repress the urge to snap To you, certainly
(The man has, after all, said no to the pleasures of the flesh,
Though he must be at least slightly aware of their existence,
As his gaze often returns to the telltale swelling of my midriff.)
He is, you have to suppose, right in terms of the big picture,
Because love is certainly ******* complicated:
For the good father, it’s the ecstasy of the saints,
The little bit of that he taps into with the sip of the wine,
The dutiful nibble of the wafer.
For some of us, it’s a ***-for-tat bargain,
Me scratching your back and you scratching mine.
Then again, it’s your mother weeping over coffee
(Judiciously augmented with an additional kick)
At three in the morning when you finally work up the nerve
To tell her what’s what and what will be down the line.
More often than not, the whole thing
Is like walking through a blackberry patch,
All thicketed and maze-like after years of neglect,
And you end up tired, *****, and scratched all to hell
To get to some berries that likely aren’t at all sweet, anyhow.

Still, the show must go on:
The congregation must have their white dress
(Folks came from out of town, after all,
And the uncles on my mother’s side
Have kicked in for an expensive and utterly pointless silver service)
So I walk down this aisle as devoted cousins beam from their pews
And various great aunts wear their fixed smiles
In various shades of red and disapproval
As the organist (near ninety now,
Flubbing notes and missing pedals,
Her tempo unnaturally adagio)
Fights the wedding march to a draw
I have fixed my mind on playing my part as best as I can,
Giving my brightest high-school-yearbook smile
As I run through rice and whispers,
Double-timing it to the back seat of Uncle John’s tank-like Continental
(Long and black as the ride at the end of our days)
To ride to the Legion Hall at the edge of the village,
Where I will dance and shine, and blithely toss the bouquet
For brides are beautiful
And brides are holy, holy, holy
Yet in the midst of my revelry I chance to look upwards
Toward the stained-glass windows,
And the light waxes and swells until it is nothing but a glow
Which threatens to engulf everything in its path.

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

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

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

She slumped by the archway of the Chapel,
Forlorn, beaten in fact;
She had come to these grounds from Plattsburgh,
(Cold, martial little city home to General Wood’s summer flings)
To lay a wreath she’d bought near the train station at Bayeux
Purchased from a women at a small shop table,
Who’d had the grace not to haggle over-much,
Knowing full well why someone would make such a purchase.
She’d hoped to lay it at her brother’s marker;
He’d been lost at Omaha, likely before he’d set foot on the sand
(She’d no ideas of such things at the time,
Death being a thing that happened to rabbits
Their old shepherd chased down in the back yard,
Or dolls beheaded courtesy of her younger brother)
But the plot number given to her with such confidence
By the young adjutant from the War Department
Had a name wholly unknown to her
(Where the information was bollixed she had no way of knowing,
Not that officialdom would be any more help to her,
With so many sons in Scranton,
So many husbands in Hamtramck,
So many fathers and brothers in the same boat)
And so she sat, overwhelmed with the distance she’d come,
The magnitude of her failure and its implications,
And the whole **** burden of simple humanity
When she was approached by an older man,
Who clearly resided nearby
(Why he was here less evident—the hush of the venue, perhaps,
Possibly some corporal he was indebted to).
He’d understood her predicament in an instant,
No doubt a scene he’d witnessed scores of times before,
Laissez-le sur un monument funéraire,
He crooned, patting her forearm
Ce n’est pas important, and he sauntered away.
She’d considered heeding his advice,
But she remained hostage
To some vestige of latter-day Babbitesque can-do,
And so she soldiered back toward the endless rows of marble,
Stretching out in endless parallel lines
As in some middle-school perspective perspective drawing
Without borders, without end.

It was late April, or perhaps early May
At the Home for Blind Children
(This was all some time ago,
When one's infirmities were spelled out quite bluntly)
And the children, being set loose
In the resolute glow of the maybe-Spring-is-here sunshine,
Were playing baseball on a diamond-ish field
Wrestled from the goldenrod and crownvetch
Through eminent domain.
Oh, the ball was large, and beeped away like Sputnik,
But it was clearly the game of Cobb and Ruth and Mantle
Just the same, the proceedings ambling on as per usual,
The kids at the plate fixing on the wobbly, blaring orb
Just in time to nick it with their bats
And, with proper and judicious direction,
Traipse around the bases in accordance with the law
As laid down by Abner Doubleday himself.
One of the children, however, inexplicably locked onto the ball
From the moment it left the pitcher's hand,
Driving it in a high arc past the fielders
And over the chain-link boundary
Which had been put up for the Little League teams
A couple of years ago.
Strangely enough, both sighted spotters
Had picked that exact moment to be miles away
From the action taking place on the field,
Perhaps distracted by an unusual bird song,
Possibly formulating plans for their day off,
Maybe even contemplating love yet to be
(It was Spring, after all)
And thus never saw the flight of the ball
As it took flight toward its unlikely landing place.
They spent the remainder of the afternoon,
The sightless and those with varying degrees of vision,
In a fruitless search in the high grass at the edge of the field
And just outside of the foul lines,
Never imagining to look outside of the fence,
As all the while a small herd of cows in an adjacent field
Stared at them impassively,
Occasionally pausing to nibble on the patchy grass and clover
In the exact spots they had grazed the day before

I knew a couple, in that once upon a time
Where fecundity was a going concern in our circle of friends,
Who’d lost another child mid-pregnancy
(It may have been the third time,
As such evils, oddly enough, tend to arrive as a trinity)
They’d fiercely, defiantly given the child a dozen names,
Including each of their saints’ names
(A finger to the eye of certain relatives,
Who’d implied and occasionally outright sniped
Recreation without procreation is the darkest of sins.)
They had, after a fashion, made a certain piece with all that transpired,
God’s will or vagaries of chance or something in-between,
But some weeks down the line the distaff part of the equation
Began to experience something akin to pure madness,
Finding evil portent and intent and all and sundry
Which they’d touched upon during pregnancy:
Doctors, in-laws, her spouse,
Even the fables they’d read to her unborn child
(The tale of the Three Little Pigs singled out for particular scorn;
We live in a ******* house made of brick, and what did that get us?
She all but screamed at her beleaguered husband.)
This all passed after a time, the ceasing of the episodes
Due to the end of some delayed post-partum depression, perhaps,
Or the grim realization that raging against some deaf deity
Is a fruitless, pointless, fretful strut across the stage,
But, in any case, life returned to normal, more or less,
Though her husband found it somewhat disconcerting
How, in the process of doing some semi-necessary remodeling
(Keep her busy, their pediatrician had told him in an aside)
She attacked the old walls in an unused bedroom upstairs
With something very much approximating fury,
The plaster-and-lath flying hither and yon,
The dust hanging in the air everywhere you looked,
Leaving a taste like ashes in their mouths for days afterward.

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

What sins have we committed, what unpardonable crime
To have brought such desolation to this once fertile plain?
(The only time we’ve ever known has been this burlap time.)

We receive no epiphanies, no glimpse of the sublime;
Just great black walls of dust and grime again and yet again.
What sins have we committed, what unpardonable crime?

The wind and dirt makes madness of our days and our nighttime
For reasons that our governors and preachers can’t explain.
(The only time we’ve ever known has been this burlap time.)

We’ve topped the dead with crosses, covered dead stock with lime.
From whom should we seek redress,to whom do we complain?
What sins have we committed, what unpardonable crime?

And so we’re left this Sisyphean peak to try and climb;
There’s no rainfall to save the crops, no cash to purchase grain
(The only time we’ve ever known has been this burlap time.)

We’ve lost interest in the answers, the reason or the rhyme;
God has, it seems, forsaken us, has forsaken the rain
What sins have we committed, what unpardonable crime?
(The only time we’ve ever known has been this burlap time.)

i.

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

ii.

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

iii.

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

iv.

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

v.

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

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

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

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

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.

Ain't much

separatin'

junkies and geniuses.

Still, dude hit pavement right on the

downbeat.

****, 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.

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

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

After so long we have returned
To reclaim all that we once spurned.
We cannot change what might have been;
Come meet me in the cool green glen.

The prudish reserve of our youth
Revealed to us no golden truth
With words writ large by flaming pen;
Come meet me in the cool green glen.

The modesty of childhood days
Has vanished like the morning’s haze
Let us embrace what we feared then;
Come meet me in the cool green glen.

The path of cautious restraint
Now bears the slightly tarnished taint
That falls upon all mortal men.
Come meet me in the cool green glen.

So all our reticence and fear
Has led us once again to here.
Just in time may not come again;
Come meet me in the cool green glen.

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

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

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.

We didn’t dwell on the streetlights,
Festooned with garland-strewn bells, ersatz nutcrackers,
The odd buoyant and ebullient snowman;
We were crossing the Hempstead Turnpike,
No task for the faint-hearted in bright light of midday,
Outright perilous on a late Friday evening
(Especially for those feeling the effects
Of an afternoon of social drinking
Which had gently spilled over into that good night.)
There were four of us—myself, and a Tehran-born trio
(Fun-loving, borderline jolly sorts,
A group of thin, dark Falstaffs, as it were)
Headed to a nearby off-campus bar,
Low-slung ranch-style edifice constructed on the Levittown model,
As non-descript and indistinguishable as its regular clientele,
Some of whom eyed us warily if not angrily,
Weighing the pros and cons of lobbing a comment in our direction
Before we headed to the “Downstairs Disco”
Which had been added, very grudgingly at that,
As a nod to the times and fiscal necessity.

In between ear-numbing bass lines
And the strobe light’s cornea-threatening ministrations,
We nursed significantly watered *****-and-tonics,
Smiled unsuccessfully at spike-heeled and Jordache-clad local girls
(Every bit as unwelcoming to clear outsiders
As their decidedly less glamorous counterparts upstairs)
And carried on brief, lightweight bits of conversation.
At one point I’d mentioned that I was looking forward to getting home
And partaking in some peace and quiet and home cooking
When suddenly, one of my companions
(A full-bearded sophomore named Anush,
Whose last name I never knew;
As his roommate Mossoud once told me,
Shaking his head and smiling,
You would never be able to pronounce it.)
Gave forth with a wail—full-throated, tear-stained
Pained to the point of being almost *******.
As I stared uncomprehendingly, Mossoud snapped at me
(His eyes thunderstorms, his words blunt as broadswords)
You! What do you understand of any of this?
And as he comforted Anush as best he could
(The music the volume of bombs,
Disco ball spitting light like tracer fire)
I began to suspect my relative uselessness
Was not simply the inability to comprehend Farsi

How many deaths are we allotted, then?
It depends on the strictness of your definition, one supposes,
For it comes in several degrees of fatality and finality,
And most often in fits and starts,
A process by which we offer up limbs,
Bits of heart and soul,
So that we can forestall some disaster
Even more wretched, more unwelcome,
And even if we walk more slowly, more cautiously
As the repeated runnings of the gauntlet exact their toll,
It may not be the implacable onslaught of age
Which roils our sleep and the periphery of our waking hours
As much as the knowledge
That, unlike our multi-epoched feline brethren,
We may not land on our feet
As the unseen hands blithely toss us
Down one more set of stairs
Which lead to the abyss.

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.)

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.

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.)

Unlike the feted Ebenezer, our intangible visitors
Are not necessarily seasonal in nature,
Nor do they waft into scene
As the result of our direct malfeasance
(Sometimes the case, to be sure,
But more likely they are the stepchildren
Of our omissions rather than our commissions)
Coming among us not through wanton transgressions,
But the upshot of our mortality
And its associated failings,
And as they glide translucently among us
In this season where the darkness comes so early
(Yet the light clutching the western horizon
For an imperceptibly longer time each day)
Their presence may be somewhat more benign
If we are able to undertake the act
Of forgiving ourselves.

i. “…THE SAME FORCE AND EFFECT AS AN ORDER OF FILIATION…”

She’d said she wasn’t expecting or demanding a ******* thing
(It’s probably your kid, she said, But I wouldn’t swear to it)
And his buddies swore he was crazier than a ******* rat
To even think about going along with the whole idea
After she all but given him a Get Out Of Jail Free card,
But he’d gone ahead and signed all the paperwork
Which, in the eyes of the state and the child-support folks,
Made him the one true father of this baby-to-be.  
He couldn’t begin to explain
Why he hadn’t fought the notion tooth-and-nail,
Save for the occasional muttered Baby oughtta have a father,
But there was more to it that; he had a vague notion
That knowing half of who you were was worse
Than having no knowledge at all, your whole reason for being
Becoming the exploration of odd hunches and unrealized fears,
The study of every man that crossed your mother’s path
In the hope (or, more likely, the absolute and utter dread)
That you were glimpsing a part of your genetic destiny,
Though such a line of thought was probably just *******,
A product of Genesee Cream Ale philosophizing.
When the time came, he’d agreed
(An idea which reduced his friends
To mute amazement and slow, sad head shaking)
To be present at the birth,
And, after certain undertakings
He’d just as soon not have seen were complete,
The nurse (saying It’s a boy.  A big, beautiful healthy boy.)
Handed him a black-mouthed, screaming little mass,
Fists clenched tightly, entire body tensed
As if it realized just how inadvisable the whole situation was.
Faced with this tangible evidence of his ostensible patrimony,
He found himself unable to say anything except
*******.  **-lee ****.

ii. As The Old Joke Goes, “In The Morning?  
*****, I Don’t Respect You Now.”

He had, of course, forgotten her name,
Assuming he’d ever known it,
And so it had been chica and hija and amada all night,
Though, to be fair, she couldn’t remember
If he was Juan or Jhonny or Jesus;
She simply remembered that he was Colombian,
All dark hair and bright smiles and quite tall
Although that could have just been a trick of the eye,
As his friends were all compact squatness,
Which she had pointed out  while they were dancing,
To which he’d subsequently horse-laughed out loud.
Chica, he’d fairly shouted over the music,
The best way to be good looking is to have ugly friends.
He’d come to Batavia to hunker down for winter
After the wineries had buttoned things up for the season,
Spending his time catching odd jobs here and there;
Anything to get by, he’d said with the most outrageous of winks.  
She’d had no intention, none whatsoever, of taking him home,
But anything to get by takes in any multitude of sins,
Venal and otherwise.
She woke up about two-thirty or so, all damp with sweat
And the remnants of *******,
To see him awake and getting dressed.
Before she could say a thing, he put a finger to her lips.
Shhh chica, he said softly and soothingly,
Like he was trying to hush an infant,
I got some stuff I really need to take care of;
Look, we’ll get breakfast, OK?
You know the Bob Evans out by the highway? Six o’ clock, eh?
And with that, it was a quick, almost brotherly, peck on the cheek,
Then he was gone, so stealthily that she was briefly unsure
That he’d ever indeed been there at all.
Breakfast, can you imagine she thought
As she rolled over to get some sleep,
Like I’m even awake at such an hour.

iii. We Don’t Ask For Directions, And We Sure As Hell Don’t Make Lists

There had been no blowup, no volcanic incidents of infidelity
No grotesque financial stupidity;  
The china and glasses had remained unbroken,
The plaster-and-lath not displaced
By the seismic slamming of doors.
It had been slow, subtle,
Like the slow unraveling of a thread here in there
Opening up a gaping hole in a old comfortable sweater,
Or how the unhurried seeping of water
Would occasionally cause an outcropping of rock
To tumble into the gorges over at Letchworth.  
Oh, there had probably been the proverbial last straw:
Maybe the new refrigerator that didn’t fit through a single door
In the entire house (and who in hell bought something like that
Without taking measurements anyway)
Or the foolhardy extended warranty on the Volvo,
Which had **** near a hundred and fifty thousand miles on it
And had no more trade-in value
Than a Matchbox miniature of the model,
But it any case, the immediate cause
Was probably more symptom than disease, anyway.
He’d packed a couple of bags with the basics
To ****, shave, shower and dress,
And jumped into the ancient but well-protected wagon,
Heading to God only knows where:
His brother in York, maybe,
Or his mom’s place way the hell up in Tupper Lake,
(Not that he had the stomach for the questions and sidelong looks That particular destination entailed)
But about ten miles out he realized
He’d forgotten his ******* bike.
****, ****, stupid **** he said,
Pounding the steering wheel in rhythm;
The notion of going back like some dumb-*** eight-year-old,
All hang-dog look and tail between his legs
Was not particularly appealing,
But the notion of having to **** time
Without the prospect of a bike ride
(Wind in what was left of his hair,
The barking in his calves as he climbed an incline,
The whole **** freedom of the thing)
Was simply too much to consider,
So he swung the car around and headed back.
She was, as he knew she would be,
Waiting in the doorway with the bike
(**** near sharing a brain after all this time, to be sure),
Her face hung with a look not really a smile or frown
Or anything that fit a definition,
But endearing all the same, and he heard a voice not quite his ask
Well, is it OK if I come in for a few minutes?

iv. The Bob Evans Out By The Highway

…the **** am I doing here anyway, she thought,
Staring down at the table, chunky taupe-ish coffee mugs
And logo plates, fine china for everyone and no one,
Set for two (she hadn’t ordered, she was waiting for someone)
The restaurant more or less empty,
Only the odd trucker or  some senior citizen
Who was still on rat-race time.
The clock had hit six-fifteen when she,
Eyes cloudy and threatening to ambush hastily applied mascara,
Was ready to flag down the waitress to let her know
That she was just a coffee, thanks, when he walked in,
No, burst in, like a madness of chrysanthemum
Where there had only been undifferentiated greenery
Mere moments before.
I’m sorry, chica, he said, bending over to kiss her cheek,
This whole life thing gets in the way sometimes, eh?
He sat down, slapping the table with both hands
Man, he said, all but snorting, I could eat a horse,
And what better place than this, mmm?