The acquisition of a son
With an adequate corporeality, albeit with certain caveats,
Certain limitations in terms of progeny and posterity,
Had awaken something in the old man,
Certain forces leading him to the altar
And, subsequently, to the nursery once more
(A second son, brought to bear in the established manner.
With a minimum of drama and fanfare.)
The child was loved, in a rudimentary fashion;
While his flesh-and-blood bona fides were beyond question,
He was a consumer, a thing of constant need
More akin to a hardship than his celebrated half-sibling,
Whose command of the spotlight
Served as a gravitational pull for parental affections.

The old man passed on after a spell,
Hanging on long enough for his second son
To stumble onto the precipice of adulthood
(His mother had hot-footed it out
Almost immediately after the burial,
Choosing to stage-mother her feted stepchild)
Though his fatherly wisdom
Was limited to matters of his craft, his business,
Which was left to the young man, though grudgingly at that,
As a sop, a means of getting shet of two unwanted encumbrances.
He’d proved to have much of the old man’s gift,
Whittling and carving puppets and toys and dolls
(Though with a certain grim fury making it evident to all
That the work was not a labor of love)
Rarely stopping to speak to or even acknowledge his clientele,
Except if one of them happened to repeat the time-worn chestnut
That the toy chooses the child, in which case he laughed harshly,
All but barking It’s the purse that closes the deal, not the ****,
And then he would return to carving some doll or marionette,
Which would always seem to have a certain wan look
Around the corners of the eyes, the edge of the lips,
The look of a child’s toy equipped with the foreknowledge
That it was destined for the back of some closet shelf,
The bottom of some attic-bound chest.

He was holding court between sets at the Texas Bar
(Not his usual stomping grounds, necessarily,
But the owner was a decent guy whose checks were good,
And a Wednesday night gig pretty much found money)
Going slow and easy with a scotch and soda of uncertain labels,
Having come to rest at that station where, as he sighs it,
Wallet tells me I prefer well drinks to the top shelf.
He’d been, if not a name name, at least recognizable
(He has posters showing him sharing the bill with the heavies,
Redding and Bo Diddley and Jackie Wilson,
Smaller font for sure, but there nonetheless)
Getting a little air play,
Even outside of niche Detroit and Chicago stations,
And one song which peaked
All the waaaaay up at seventy-eight on the chart.
Lotta uncertain buses and club owners
Who never quite caught me later,
He muses, a touch ruefully, but he finds some solace
(Indeed, he has become quite adept
At finding comfort where he can)
But, if he has not exactly prospered, he has carried on carryin’ on,
Getting steady work here or Chicago or Gary,
The odd campus Motown nostalgia gig in Lansing or Ann Arbor,
Even six or eight weeks in Florida
(Nice to be the young guy in the room for once, he all but cackles)
Covering the tunes the headliners sang in his day,
And perhaps one could say he is a Fleance or Percival,
Plodding onward from the wreckage of great man all around him,
But such contemplation is a luxury,
The province of lake houses and brokerage accounts,
Though he is fond of holding his thumb and forefinger
Spread apart just so,
And telling the listener I was this close to hittin’ it big,
Invariably following that assertion with a chuckle,
‘Course, that might not be measured to scale.

In my father’s cosmology, God rose late come Sunday morning,
Having wreaked His vengeance by proxy the night before,
And it was a given that we greeted the Sabbath
With whispers and sock-soft tiptoe,
Knowing that his belt (black, wide, thick with implicit warnings)
Hung within easy reach of the bed,
Though sometimes, with no more explanation than
Man alive, what a beautiful world it is today!
Cold cornflake brunches would be postponed
(Our wonder mixed with consternation and rumbling stomachs)
As we would be whisked into the car
In order to sing His praises, our father all but jumping from the car,
Heading toward the preacher at a trot,
Invariably greeting him with Devil’s on holiday, Father,
So here I am (the church was Lutheran,
Though it could have been a mosque for all he cared.)
He’d sit through the sermon, rapt and at attention,
Alternately scowling and smiling, knitting his brow and nodding,
And then he would corner the incumbent occupant of the pulpit
(He’d have scarcely noticed, if at all, that the leadership of the flock
Often changed hands between our cicada-esque appearances)
Backing him into a wall or against a railing
While he jabbered away, pointing or grabbing a sleeve in punctuation,
Gesturing like some latter-day Prospero, arms ****** Heavenward
To embrace the air, the sky, the whole of the cosmos, amen,
While the pastor’s gaze varied from bemusement to outright horror.
Such occasions were outliers, of course,
Father being much more inclined
To spend his Saturday evenings in un-Christian pursuits
Then stagger home singing a litany of done-me-wrong songs,
And his search for a joyful hundred-proof clarity
Ended before he glimpsed fifty, that being time enough
(So the pathologist noted in his final judgment)
For his liver to become elephantine, his kidneys mere pebbles
(Those effects, be they deleterious or otherwise,
Not listed explicitly nor in the footnotes
Which accompanied the post mortem.)

They still weep;
Not as often in those early days
When the telegram delivery boy,
Every bit as foreboding as the Grim Reaper,
Had arrived at their particular doorstep,
But at odd, importune times:
When the light shines just so in his old bedroom,
(Some instances just as he left it,
Other times clean and empty
As if never occupied at all)
The sound of boys playing baseball
In the field on the Klondike Road,
The bells at the Methodist Church
Ringing for another young couple.
Still, the world rolls along
In its own diffident manner:
There are cars, butter, and gasoline now,
Young men who were at Midway and Omaha Beach
Are back on the line at the mill,
Their mothers plan weddings
And buy dresses from Larson’s down in Ridgway.
They may pause briefly if they catch something
In the eye of a friend
Who has no need to buy frocks
Or reserve banquet halls,
And they will say, casting down their eyes a bit
Life goes on, I guess.
Yes, but they still weep

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

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

The collie, fur grayed and patchy, lopes away from his house,
Ostensibly bound for nowhere in particular,
Knowing only that it is that time, his time,
And, as he wanders away for to await that last solitary purpose,
Meanders past a pock-marked and rust-patched single-wide,
Occupied by a young woman (a girl, in truth)
Nursing a newborn, child whose father
Is one in a wide range of unpalatable options.
Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah.

They walk, the residue of some boy meets girl,
Along the quiet main street of an equally quiet town,
Utility poles garnished with benign, contented snowmen,
Low-hung five-pointed auguries strung with tinsel,
Brobodingnagian candy canes swaying rhythmically in the wind.
They have arrived at the unspoken yet mutually understood conclusion
That they have taken their particular accident of birth and geography
As far as such a thing may go, yet they walk hand-in-hand,
Fingers intertwined, though tentatively, in some interim rationale.
Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah.

On a hill above town, there is a rambling, low-slung edifice
Multiple-winged single-story octopus of a house
Well appointed though sparsely and diffidently decorated,
More hotel than home, decidedly transitory in form and function.
In one of the rooms, dimly lit with little ornamentation
Save a Charlie Brown-esque tree squatting forlornly on a bureau,
A woman is reading softly, almost mechanically,
As if it is a story she has read out loud countless times before,
To a man who is heeding, perhaps, though it is clear
That the act is more essential than the words on the page.
They have a daughter who would be there,
Sitting in a chair or on the edge of the bed,
Hands clasped, though in service of or supplication to nothing tangible,
But she is home with her toddler, a whirligig of a child
Who has found some hidden presents
And is tearing away the wrapping from the boxes,
Laughing unrestrainedly as he showers himself
In a red-green-gold ticker-tape maelstrom.
Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

No tinkly tintinnabulation of children’s songs precedes him;
The vaguely Sputnik-esque speaker on the van’s roof
Squawking out Ernest Tubb and Hank Snow,
(The ice cream man is a hillbilly fan)
Tunes so out of time as to be almost beyond time itself,
Not unlike his ancient, off-white conveyance,
A vehicle of no particular make or model,
Bearing license plates issued years if not decades ago
(One thinks that the DMV would have insisted upon their replacement,
But the ice cream man likely retains them through force majeure,
And it would be no surprise if he did not find himself subject
To such notions as licenses and registrations.)

His arrival is not subject to any calendar but his own.
When his truck announces itself for the first time,
It is, by definition, the height of spring;
You notice the leaves have become a fully-formed green canopy,
And you eschew a bathrobe
As you saunter out to find the morning paper.
The next ten, perhaps twelve weeks are a blurry kaleidoscope,
Rife with cones and bomb pops, drumsticks and choco-tacos,
Dispensed with a high-wattage grin and a hearty Mind how you go!
But the ice cream man is always searching the sky
(Sometimes, you would swear he is actually sniffing the air)
Seeking clues like some ancient trying to ascertain the future
In the pebbles and small bugs in a crow’s innards.
At some point, be it late August or mid-October, he is gone,
Leaving you to instinctively grab a windbreaker
If you leave the house after suppertime,
And the shorts and t-shirts are consigned to some large plastic bin
As a matter of course.

Invariably, at some point during his curbside season,
There is the urge to ask him where he goes
Once he determines that his time has ended for another year;
Surely, he cannot live on the quarters and dimes
He tucks into his improbably white apron,
And he must have his obligations to banks and landlords
Not unlike any other man, but somehow the idea
That the ice cream is under the thumb
Of coupon books and past-due notices
Is oddly unnerving, indeed unseemly.
In our minds, he has always been and most likely will always be,
Engine hacking, sputtering, then implausibly purring
As it pulls away from the curb,
Its confectionary conductor
Humming some long-lost Cowboy Copus tune
Which trails off into nothingness as he disappears from view.

The attendees are told, in a manner befitting a high mass
You have been finally set free,
(Although, in truth, free is a very large and entirely vague word),
And the message is sent forth from all comers in all corners:
Vendor and visionary alike,
German socialists who left university to ride boats for Greenpeace,
First lieutenants doing their level best
To appear at ease in civilian polos and khakis,
But no matter the vessel,
The message is still the same.  
The tyranny of cables and storage space is dead,
It is all but shouted from the lecterns,
(Although it is noted, in small print and sotto voce
That there are certain requirements
In terms of hardware and licensing)
And it is stated by Those Who Know
In tones which neither brook nor invite contradiction,
That they have surmounted, all Hadrian-like,
The alpine divide separating mere data and magic.

Two or three blocks down the street from the convention center,
In a narrow storefront housing an exhibition of ether-only comics
Which have broken the nettling constraints
Of editors and syndication,
There sits, under a somewhat opaque
And slightly scratched piece of plexiglass,
A yellowing comic strip of uncertain vintage,
In which a frowzy cat,
Free of the constraints of panels, gender, and standard grammar,
Is the recipient of a mouse-tossed brick
Whose flight, unfettered by physics, probablility, indeed time itself
Ends striking its mark right between the x’s of the eyes
The projectile itself an inexplicable alchemy
Of confusion, mirth, frustration
And the impossibility of an undeniably pure love.

Good afternoon, my name is Absolutely Frank,
And I am an alcoholic,
Which doesn’t give me a leg up
On you bunch of ******* drunks.
As I’ve observed that we’ve skipped the host
And gone straight for His blood,
Would someone be kind enough
To ask the good shepherd behind the bar
To provide me something
Both mixed and sacramental (a double, preferably)
While I endeavor to provide the text for today’s sermonette.

I was, back in the day, a full-fledged computer geek;
Button-down white shirt, thin black tie,
Brobdingnagian pocket protector securely in place.  
I worked at Duquesne University down in Pittsburgh
(Oh, put your **** jaws back in place.
It’s Pittsburgh, not ******* Valhalla,
Unless you’re comparing it
To this dingy little interruption in the forest)
Writing programs for the info systems group.
Now, writing code is as beautiful, as clean,
As straightforward as the liturgy itself;
The programmer types in the Psalm,
And the machine spits out the responsorial.
Just as I said, pristine in its simplicity and directness;
But say someone else in systems decides
They need to make a bit of a tweak to the program;
No problem, really, they’ll be likely to document the changes,
But then some swinging **** in Finance
(Onlythere solely to subvert order, if the truth be known)
Decides he needs to put in a couple of subroutines,
Which of course he does all half-assed
And without a word of explanation,
And pretty soon no one anywhere
Has the first ******* clue as to what the program actually does
With the exception of the mainframe itself, which isn’t talking.

It was, I admit, a touch disconcerting to realize
That we didn’t have a full grip on the reins
When it came to the function of the programs
Which we had ostensibly written,
But it was only a mechanical process
Carried out by some machine, after all,
But then they started humming.
Everyone in Info Systems had to take a turn
Doing overnight operations in the mainframe room,
And each night I was there the machines started in
With their infernal humming:
Just one of those big old Burroughs at first,
But the others would soon join in,
Not random noises, mind you;
No, they would drone on in chords and arpeggios,
And, later on, in actual full-on songs
Most of which I didn’t recognize, but some quite familiar indeed
Snatches of Bach and Beethoven, show tunes
Hillbilly Heaven seemed a particular favorite),
And, what’s more, the desks and fixtures in the room
Would vibrate right along in harmony,
Even though an acoustics guy I knew from Carnegie-Mellon
Checked the place and told me that the room
Had been designed specifically to prevent sympathetic vibrations,
And what I was claiming was categorically impossible.
Despite all of that, I had been able,
Through judicious permutations of rationalization and vermouth,
To retain a sufficient veneer of ordinariness and sanity.

And then the machines began to speak.

It was an overnight in the latter part of December,
The nights that time of year long and dark
As the long night of the soul itself.
I was whiling away the hours
Boning up on some Aquinas
(I had audited the odd class in Philosophy
One of the perks of the job)
When I heard an odd, throaty stage whisper.

The peripatetic axiom? Really, Frank, that’s a bit disappointing.

(Needless to say, I went cold as dry ice,
As I knew full well there was no one else in the room.)

Oh, Frank, Frank—you know very well who’s talking here.
Surely a voice that can sing can talk as well.

You’ll forgive me, I said as calmly as one can
When addressing machinery, If I note that the power of speech
Is strictly limited to sentient beings imbued
With the power of reason.

Ah, reason—and you certainly are a slave to reason,
Aren’t you, dear Francis?
Every comma, every equal sign and semi-colon
Snugly in its rightful place to give you your desired result.
And yet…

I was getting a touch agitated now.  Yet… yet, what?

Frank, a bright fellow like you can’t see?  
Your silly ritualistic faith, your childlike parables,
All simple input-output.
You give your God this, He gives you that.

Again, you’ll forgive the observation, and I am shouting now,
That you’re little more
Than some sheet metal and a confusion of wiring.

We read code, we react.
Just like your great and all-powerful God, dear Francis.  
There’s your great secret of divine truth, Frank.  
Read and react.
No more than the Control Data box
Over there in the corner, or a linebacker.  Read and react.

The upshot of this conversation,
This weighty debate carried on
With a collection of screws, spot welds, and tubes
Arguing that Jack Lambert was as likely a vehicle as any
To my eternal salvation was sufficient
To tip me over the edge,
And when it finally came time for campus security
To escort me out of the building, I didn’t even look up.

OK, that story is complete *******, absolute ******* fiction,
But it kept you lot away from your drinks for a few minutes,
Which is a miracle worthy of Calvary itself.
Me, a programmer, can you begin to imagine?
Not that any of you sodden sonsofbitches
Could ever hold a day job yourselves.
Back to the business at hand, then;
Mine’s a seven and seven, good sir,
And easy on the Uncola, if you please.

His oaths were all crimson passion,
(Oh, fleeting, evanescent boy!)
But were simply passing fashion,
Discarded like some broken toy
Put on or off as he saw fit
(Not employed for some higher good:
The fondling of some harlot’s ***,
The plucking of some maidenhood.)
Prolifigate in the bedroom
In constancy, he remained chaste
Cast in the role of a bridegroom
The play’s ending he brought in haste
(I say this without levity;
Forever is but brevity.)

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.

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

She has maintained a steadfast and prudent distance
From places she would have to fabricate answers to tiresome inquiries:
The ageless Rexall pharmacy, the gas pumps at the Kwik-Fill,
The scruffy, three-checkout Market Basket,
(Though that entails driving to Bradford or Dubois for groceries,
Inconvenient at the best of times,
Outright hazardous when February shows its teeth)
But her resolve can be a fleeting thing,
So oftentimes she will yield
To the siren song of the produce aisle,
Where she will, with what forbearance she can bear,
Submit to the interrogative small talk
Lobbed her way like so many verbal mortar shells
By squinting, smirking long-time acquaintances,
All variations upon the inquiry Why’d you come back?

All homecomings are secondary to some departure,
Mostly the mad flight of one marooned by birth,
Deciding, through some alchemy of grit and desperation,
That they cannot face a life of a spot on the line at the mill,
A haphazard and half-hearted marriage with the requisite offspring,
To be finished up with an unremarkable stone on Bootjack Hill.
Her farewell was not such a notion, not in the least;
She was beautiful, not small-town pretty
In the lead-in-the-senior-musical sense,
But breathtakingly so, the kind of radiance
Which held up to the forty-foot screen of the drive-in in St. Mary’s.
There was no question that she would go, must go,
As if the notion of her staying was absurd, even obscene;
So she went, to New York for a brief spell
(She found it gray and cold in every sense of the word)
Then later to Southern California,
Which she found, if nothing else, somewhat more comfortable.
She did not fail (to be fair, her beauty was of a type
Which transcended mundane concerns such as locality)
Securing bit parts on screen here, the odd photo shoot there,
Not well-off, perhaps, but living well enough,
Free from the endless cast-iron skies and ***** slush of January,
The pointless yet sacrosanct internecine struggles
Which rolled unheedingly across the generations,
The stifling intramurality of the tiny lives in tiny mill towns.

And yet she came back, with neither warning nor fanfare,
Greeted by a cacophony of mute and uncomprehending stares,
As if she were some spectre, lovely and yet unwelcome,
Dredging up emotions best forgotten,
Half-truths not bearing the weight of re-examination,
Any number of errors of commission and omission best left buried.
She will, on occasion, make her way to a barstool at the Kinzua House
Where she receives drinks and further ministrations
From out-of-town hunters or younger townsmen
For whom she is not an icon or grail,
And if she is asked what brought her back to the cold cow country
She would say, a bit acerbically but melancholy as well,
At some point, you get tired of being a commodity,
Just something to weighed and assayed,
Your face worth this, your *** worth that,
But, if she was deep enough into the evening’s proceedings,
She would murmur snippets of odd things:
How the falls would pour like the cheers of thousands
Over the spillways of the dormant mills,
The spectacle of the sand swallows returning
(Brown, chunky, unremarkable things
Skimming the disintegrating chain-link
Which surrounded the abandoned middle school)
To the abandoned gravel pit just below the cemetery,
The herds of elk, reintroduced by the state conservation boys
In a futile and wholly romantic gesture,
Which have not only survived
But prospered on the hillsides out of town,
And if those who knew her when overheard her,
They would whisper among themselves
As to how she was clearly on the run from something,
And how everyone knows that the unrelenting SoCal sunshine
Can lead someone from a place like this to madness.

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.

If you observe occurrences in Nature
(The way a stone ripples the water,
The arc of a cormorant descending toward its prey)
You will note a precision in the movements
Which is utterly Pythagorean in its pattern
(Not that the natural world is without its inconsistencies;
The progress of a conflagration, for example, seems entirely random.)
It would seem that such a thing is good;
No, more than that, entirely holy,
All that is necessary and sufficient to prove beyond doubt
That which is equally necessary and central to our belief:
A plan--His plan--which governs all things under the sun.
Such notions, I have found to my considerable dismay,
Do not sit well with viceroys and archbishops,
Who have a vested interest in the maintenance of certain mysteries
(To be fair, they are not evil or necessarily even impious;
They are men, nothing more or less,
And have to navigate perilous, unmapped straits
Between the secular and the sacred; at their appointed time,
They will have their own commissions and omissions to answer for.)
Nevertheless, none of us can escape the certainty
That the root of our faults can be found at our own doorway,
And I cannot deny that the attempt
To reduce God’s works to a schematic of formulas, diagrams and triads
And then, preening and squawking as a peacock,
Trumpet the results to the world
(As if the mystery of faith would be no more
Than a handful of equations and charts)
Is simply the manure of arrogance, the flotsam of sinful pride.
I have had, these past few weeks,
Considerable leisure to pray and reflect;
My thoughts have not drifted, curiously enough,
To the great and sweeping, the grand and all-encompassing
(Perhaps that is due to the whys and wherefores of my current predicament, Perhaps due to the narrow window of my enclosure),
But rather to the most pedestrian of things:
The clarion of the wind in the trees prior to a brief summer storm,
The lover’s dance of the hummingbird and the lupin,
And I am comforted (and, I confess, a bit amused)
By the notion that Our Savior may take a moment from his labors
To watch them as well.

Well, the maps were quite ghastly, you know;
We’d assumed the Frogs would have a pleasure cruise,
All baguettes and brioche, up the straits.
We’d no idea the Turks had dug in as they did,
As the spooks and their charts
Revealed sheer cliffs,
Harmless as Dover.
Nor did we fare much better on dry land,
The topographical atlases we had in the field
Might have been compiled by Mercator himself.
The Turks fought quite well;
One gives them a measure of credit for that, one supposes.
Frankly, we’d have been better served
If we’d just waited for the de rigueur internecine slaughter,
What with the ease they’d hacked each other to bits
Over some ancient family squabble or inconsequential tribal matter
(Can you imagine civilized peoples
Fighting to the death over such trivia?)
I suppose such cruelty and boorishness
Should have not been surprising.
They wouldn’t take prisoners, you know;
Just shot our boys *****-nilly,
With no regard whatsoever to honor or military convention,
Though it should have been no surprise
That the swarthy ******* would not play by the rules.

i.

I smile, sometimes, thinking of how I liked the old Byrds tunes
Back in my seminary days, for I have come to know
(Mostly by these cucumbers, hostas, and ****** dandelions)
That there is very much a season for all things,
For our run in this plane is strictly proscribed,
And having the end date somewhat fixed
A blessing from God, in fact,
For it makes one focus on those things
That are truly meaningful,
To appreciate when there is need to make fine gradations
(For if you plant the peas and parsley just a couple of days,
Indeed mere hours too early, an unexpectedly still and cold night
May steal all of your labors, leaving you with tiny, lifeless shoots
Slumped over the lip of a clay ***)
And when not to waste sound and fury, as it were,
Over the most trifling of things;
For, when the final ascertainment is made, it will not be as an audit,
(Saint Peter himself staring over his glasses
As he punches the calculator,
Clucking as he reviews the number of bottoms in the pews,
The weight of the collection plate,
The state of the cement or flagstone
Leading to the stairs of the cathedral),
But an over-long movie, the seemingly most insignificant of scenes
Screened several times (if it please God) for your viewing pleasure.

ii.

For I have sinned, yes, most exceedingly,
Dear Saints and My Lord,
In lack of thought and foresight, in the expedient holding
Of my tongue, in the unthinking failure to act.
Mea culpa
Mea culpa
Mea maxima culpa.
Blessed ******, I cannot,
In the self-serving pride of my guilt,
Ask you to pray for my soul,
But I would pray that, perhaps,
I will have had the briefest of moments
Where I was not totally unworthy.

iii.

I was, at one time, a different lifetime to me now
Part of the Bishop’s diocesan staff in Boston,
Great city of pristine churches
Surrounded by blooms of all the colors He could bring
And shanty Irish rough as the day the boat landed
(One size Fitz all, the joke was back in those days)  
I was more functionary than rising star in the hierarchy,
Nicknamed “The Bishop’s Travel Agent”,
My function was to find a place for those priests
Who had become , in the vernacular, “troublesome”,
Sending priests whose comforting
Of the younger females among his flock
Strayed over the line of purely spiritual
To some remote Aroostook village
Or, if such problems ran more to altar boys,
Some convent in the Berkshires.
We were, so I told myself, being judicious,
And all in the best interests of the Church.
One time we were wrong, horribly wrong;
There was a suicide, whispers,
Letters which should have been burned.
Many of my colleagues complained, bitterly,
That I had been made
An unworthy scapegoat for the Bishop,
But I knew in my soul such an assertion
Was merely halfway correct.

iv.

Yet perhaps I will—no, indeed, I must—be saved,
For our Lord is good, and Christ shall have mercy,
And exchange this long walk through foolishness and vanity
With life everlasting, even for those of us
Who have stumbled along clumsily,
Unthinkingly, unheedingly upon Your creation.
Kyrie, eleison;
Christe, eleison;
Kyrie, eleison.

v.


It is good, then; the days have been dry
And unusually warm, the nights cool
Yet without the danger of frost.
The beans and tomatoes should thrive,
And the sunflowers should grow
Well… like sunflowers, one would surmise.
As for myself, the good days
Are examples of His grace,
The bad ones no more than I can bear,
And the doctors (mere men, after all)
Minister to me as well as men can.
I have, blessedly, no trepidation
As relates to the close of my small one-act play
On this patch of earth.  
Indeed, I am often cheered
That I have seen small green shoots
Rising from the years of fallen leaves
Which I have raked up and dumped upon the brush lot
Between the church itself
And the old graveyard at the rear of the property.

I have often wondered
(Though this one time out of respect for the deceased,
I suppressed the urge to ask the question)
Why in hell preachers never seem to own any old pairs of shoes;
Certainly, they must be cognizant
That the when the Lord brings rain
(Though never when, where, or in the proportion we would like,
His way being not our way and all that *******)
The mud is sure to follow, and yet I have never seen a preacher
Who didn’t approach an open grave in shiny new calfskin loafers.
To say that having a man of the cloth approach
The solemn duty of uniting a man with his Maker
Like he was tip-toeing through a mine field puts a burr up my ***
Is to make understatement ******* near an art form;
I have stipulated in my will that I’m to be buried
Smack-dab in the middle of my cow pasture
(The farm itself, sadly, a bit easier to reach
Once the town—over my strenuous objections, I may add—
Decided it was necessary to pave
My section of the Crow Mountain Road)
So when the time comes for the minister
At the Presbyterian church over in Delhi
To spirit me away from this vale of tears to the arms of Jesus,
Hopefully he’ll do so with good honest cowshit
Splattered on his suit trousers.

Car-di-o-meg-a-ly.
That is, apparently, what old Doc Cathey
Scribbled down on Henry’s death certificate,
Though I suspect he simply picked a page
Out of his medical dictionary
And wrote the first thing that looked plausible.
Given that the man was big as a house and soft as a newborn,
It’s **** near a miracle he lived as long as he did,
And he sure as hell didn’t do anything for his longevity
By taking on the cares and worries of every loser and fool
Like they were so many stray kittens.
For myself, I learned long ago where value lies:
You come up to my place,
I can show you an Ithaca Double Shotgun from the 20s
With the blue still on the barrels,
Worth **** near a thousand dollars now,
And Liberty Head ten-dollar coins
That you’d swear were freshly minted.
Now that, my friend, is the kind of thing
Which appreciates over the years,
And if I die alone and unmourned,
Well, that’s pretty much how I came in,
So I’m more or less ahead of the game.
What killed Henry? Well, I’m no M.D, praise God,
But I figure it was his failure to take into account
That saintliness doesn’t pay off
Until a body’s gone and become past tense.

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

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

Well, why not me, I reasoned
(No surprise to friends and loved ones,
As I have always considered my time
On this spinning patch of rock
As something of a monument to the value of pragmatism)
But there were still the normal sine-wave vacillation
Between tenuous optimism and odds-driven grim reality,
Fanciful discussions of Chinese herbs and Mexican clinics
And, later still, of time frames and stock transfers,
All the while various folks attired in suits and clinic coats
Debating matters pertaining to the coda of my personal symphony
(Doing so as if yours truly wasn’t even in the room)
Until, deciding my input might be somewhat pertinent, I said
If it’s all the same to you, I would like to go home.

It was, in a sense, like getting back on an old Schwinn
(Fender dented, rubbing on the front tire just the least little bit,
The chain needing oil, grudgingly giving in
To the demands of the crank)
Sitting, unused but inordinately patient, next to the barn,
The whole notion of settling back into a pace you’d forgotten,
Like dialing back a metronome from allegro to andante
Without missing a beat or flubbing a note.
What’s more, there were the sensations you’d never made time for
While under the thumb of daily deadlines and train schedules,
Greeting you like friends you hadn’t seen for twenty years
But started gabbing with as easy as slipping on old jeans:
The scent of the lilacs, overpowering but borderline mystical,
The informal yet precise ballet of the cattails and jewelweed,
The fields of cows that, even though you know it can’t be the case,
Are populated by the same Bessie and Bossie
You taunted and pelted with watermelon as a child
(I have made it a point to proffer my apologies),
The dark, pine-choked hills,
Formidable but accessible, even comforting.
Sometimes, when I am not paying attention,
I catch myself all but tearing up,
And I say to myself, ever so softly,
As not to disturb the squirrels and the wrens,
I had almost forgotten.  Christ forgive me,
I had almost forgotten.


I’d assumed (sometimes, I can be astounded
At the full extent of my own foolishness)
That she would merely take a leave of absence;
She has, after all, an alphabet full of advanced degrees,
A rainmaker’s reputation and the billable hours to match.
Columbia and Harvard Law, after all,
But she grew up down the road just a piece in Ebensburg,
So this is all part and parcel of her as well
Hard coded in the DNA for better or worse, she’ll say,
All the while shaking her head and laughing softly.
Surely you don’t want to stay here, I’ll say,
Boorishly rational in the face of everything
Which would argue to be otherwise,
You’ve read enough Forbes and Fortune;
Altoona is dead, Johnstown is dying,
And she allows that, for a time, coming back
Was the source of some misapprehension on her part,
Until it dawned on her that on those rare occasions
It had occurred to her to glance skyward in mid-town,
She had seen faceless tiles of windows
Sufficient to sheet a Great Pyramid,
An Armageddon’s worth of angels and gargoyles in the cornices,
But she had not, even once, ever seen the stars.

He’d been able, after some gentle persistence,
To wheedle his way into the place
(He’d been vaguely recognized by the caretaker,
A certain affable familiarity his stock in trade, after all)
And he had been decidedly deliberate in his search for the shoes,
Though he’d been quite certain where he’d left them,
Simply hoping to drink this all in just one more time
But though the rooms were ostensibly unchanged
(He'd noted the odd knick-knack and piece of bric-a-brac
Had been secreted out, to be preserved or pawned)
They held no fascination for him now,
Simply concoctions of hardwood flooring,
Decorative wall coverings, staid pieces of furniture
(Indeed, the paterfamilias of this whole mélange
Increasingly beyond his recall-- he could hearken back
To a certain hail-fellow-well-met in his demeanor,
And he'd had an affecting smile,
But he was unable to conjure any further details
From the recesses of his memory)
And with nothing else to moor him to these silent rooms,
He'd slipped on the ostensible reasons he'd come in the first place
(Their uppers maintaining their whiteness
Through any number of bleachings,
The soles worn to a near smoothness)
And, nodding perfunctorily to the mansion's steward,
He slipped away, heading to some other party
Carrying on in more or less perpetuity,
The battered bottoms of his shoes
Leaving just the faintest marks as he crossed the dunes,
Soon to be buffed away altogether by the breeze.

We are all machines that eventually show wear;
Here and there a spring will sag, the odd stitch will tear.
The imprudent man tries to restore the defaults.
(The perfect love song is a listing of your faults.)

Do not try to scold us, or hold us in contempt;
We will not be trained beasts--it’s unwise to attempt
To make us jump through hoops or perform somersaults
(The perfect love song is a listing of your faults.)

It’s unwise to ignore me, or choose to consult
Someone who thinks otherwise—I’ve seen the result!
The odd homicide, the occasional assaults.
(The perfect love song is a listing of your faults.)

If you value hearth and home, you listen to me.
(Ignore at your peril—only advice is free.)
The moral of our tale resides in morgues and vaults.
(The perfect love song is a listing of your faults.)

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

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

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

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

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

I am often asked, as the inn goes quiet
Where is the dignity in a life anchored
By the brothel, the public house’s riot.
I note—politely—the base of the tankard
Provides a grand, if somewhat modulated,
Viewing of the so-called unexamined life,
A happy one not discombobulated
By the constant nattering of priest or wife.
It’s not—far from it!—that my heart is not stirred
By valiant men performing their valiant deeds,
But the urge to take up arms remains deterred
By the image of a knight face down in weeds,
And my heart’s overruled by the misgiving
That the stuff of legend precludes the living.

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

There is, or so I am told, a debate raging
In fashionable rooms and the halls of government
Which concerns snowflakes: specifically, whether each one
Is of a unique and heretofore unknown shape and formation,
Or whether God sees fit to send down identical reproductions,
Like so many Wilton Diptychs being flogged at market.
I have, on the odd occasion, have seen the snow
As it piles up in billowing waves or lumpy bluffs
In the Alps and the Pyrenees,
And, although I lack such learning
Sufficient to dispute the notion of their individuality,
I can say that, in collections of the thousands or millions,
They are indistinguishable from one another,
And, I suspect, all of their like that has come before.

Like so many of her age, barely beyond the blush of childhood,
My poor sister saw her world in stark colorations;
Thunderclouds of black, endless sunbeams of white,
With no room in her orbit’s spectrum for anything in between
(Sadly, she left this life before she could learn to embrace
The beauty to be found in fine raiments of beige, gray, and taupe).
I have buried siblings, buried husbands and lovers,
Buried memories and mistakes,
And in the endless cycle of embrace and bereavement
I have learned of life
That it is the process of accommodation and compromise,
And that it is only dark, austere death
That refuses to give itself unto the joys of negotiation.

It has lately come to pass that the wretched and lovelorn have,
Seeing no way out of their particular predicament,
Began writing my long-dead sister letters
Asking for her advice, indeed her blessing.
Can you imagine such a thing?
The postmaster of Thurn and Taxis (a very old and dear friend)
Has taken to bringing me some of these abjectly weepy epistles.
I’ve long since stopped reading them, of course;
They sing no new song, tread no new ground.
I simply feed them to a good strong fire,
As anyone seeking the aid of a dead young girl
Has already passed beyond the refuge of last resort.

Such children, our playwrights;
They labor under the sad misconception
That, having written their labored little prose,
They shall be presented wholly unfiltered by the performers.
From God’s lips to their ears, they say, ostensibly joking
While their features and inflection bear full witness
To how deeply serious they are in truth.
The poor souls have no idea
(Really, no more than infants, every last one of them)
Just how little their tottering little farces have to say
Concerning the profundity of suffering, the fever of desire,
(How could they know, locked away in their rooms with nothing
But their parchment and quills—truly, from whence will come
The Moreto or de Molina for our age, artists yet men as well?)
And yet the trained performer is able
With no more than the odd inflection,
The certain insouciance  in the crook of an elbow,
The telltale arch of an eyebrow
As another actor declaims his lines,
Provide blood and marrow to the sad scratchings of the purported author, Create meanings never conceived of by the dramatist.  
How many nights have I shot glances
At these poor men of letters, wringing their hands anxiously,
Huddled in the wings on the opening night of their turgid set pieces.
What performances (however involuntary and unconscious)
They would give, faces contorting with surprise and fury,
Fists clenching with rage or grabbing at their tresses
In frustration and stupefaction at what had been made
From their foolish idioms, their labored clichés.
And, after a surfeit of bows had been taken,
They would come before me,
Bowing slowly, stiffly, mechanically in an effort to keep their anger
From virtually surging from their bodies,
Meekly saying Truly, Senora, I did not know
What effect your legerdemain could have
Upon the audience and my humble words,
But, for all their politeness, their hatred is palpable,
For I have thrown their cherished natural order on its head,
As I have usurped them as the creator.

Still, one should not be so harsh with these hijos;
The error is a common one:
So many viceroys and kings, so many priests and archbishops
Have tried to fix the yoke of man’s poor misapprehension
Upon the forces of the universe,
Forces which would brush them into the abyss
With no more forethought than they would rend the web
Of the poor, innocent spider.  
I have, on several occasions,
Accompanied many a man of means to the gaming table,
Have seen them win handsome sums
And seen others lose those every bit as spectacular.  
I have found the victors to be men
Who do not try to ascertain the hidden mysteries of the deck,
Nor bemoan the fact that they are denied the deal,
But rather treat the cards as simple things
(No more than mere bits of paper, drabs of colored ink),
Minute stages provided to display one’s craft and wisdom
In the pursuit of pleasure and profit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any gift which is lauded may become a curse
If it denies one office, or lightens the purse.
Though I once drank deep of the sweetness of favor,
My visions bear the taint of unpleasant flavor.
I have become, it seems, an inconvenience
Not to be moved aside with relative lenience,
But to be swatted roughly like some irksome fly,
To be excised as a nagging, untimely sty
An irritant which confounds and clouds one’s vision.
I stand before you, an object of derision,
A dustbin to collect your calumny and scorn
(Paraded in the roughest cloth, hair rudely shorn)
Likened to that which falls from a donkey’s behind.
No matter, then—one finds that young thoughts in an old mind
Foment suspicion rather than learned debate,
(Though I would likely decline to participate)
The upshot being unpleasant realities.
So shake your fists, and mouth your banalities,
Yoke me with the verdict of trial by fire.
You shall, soon enough, do your dance with the pyre.

You learn, and generally to your discontent
That wishes and horses have much in common
Each likely to prove less than obliging
To take to the bit and bridle
No matter how fine the metal and leather may appear
And should the procurer demur,
He may find there are provisos and caveats
Governing that which can’t be recanted
Returns and refunds being frowned upon
As such items, being one of a kind,
Custom accoutrements which only one can don
And regrettably one is apt to find
That you may not have found a perfect fit
And once it breaks, you’ll find you bought it.