There is a certain shock, not from the silence itself
But of its revelations, the laying bare
Of the utter superfluence of language
In all which unfolds before us, the testament mute
But imbued with all the power of an orchestra
In full-throated fortissimo
Delivered through the panorama of the vast steppes,
The bounty of their Junes,
The desolation of their Januarys
The visage of the doomed Strelnikov,
The darting glances of the chameleonesque Komarovsky,
His eyes scuttling to and fro like dark cockroaches,
And most of all by the unquiet, not-of-this world gaze
Of Yuri Andreyevich, a stare which tells tales
Of how fleeting this world's happiness will be,
How final and inescapable its sadness,
And as he stumbles and falls in his mad, final pursuit
Of a grail which is unheeding, unseeing,
Always just a step out of reach,
The dialogue is not a necessity,
For we have a trove of our own words and experience
To attest to the veracity of the scene in question.

And so we offer what we shall,
Sometimes in tune with the season
For those of us of the Christmas-and-Easter-visit-to-the-pews set,
Sometimes in the seeking of some benediction,
Other times for things less tangible,
A certain haunting or hunger not subject to definition.
They are, by their natures and ours,
Unremarkable things of humdrum origin,
For we are not of that stratum
Where our munificence is duly noted
With testimonial dinners or staid brick campus buildings
Bearing our patronymic on some plaque,
For we are but the most minor of the magi,
Our alms likely to thump wanly
At the bottom of small cardboard box
Or rattle thinly on some plate,
And we can only hope that we are judged
With an emphasis on intent over content.

I shared a beer and sympathy with a gnarled, obsolete man
Whose wizened visage spoke of unwise choices.
He spoke wistfully (though apropos of nothing) of an abandoned diner
Near the terminus of a truncated and decommissioned road,
Its parking lot an unhappy armistice
Of cracked tarmac and scrub grasses,
The building still sporting caricatures of the proprietors
(The artist a devotee of the Bob’s Big Boy school)
Though time had robbed them of the odd eyeball,
And a shoulder or elbow had faded surreptitiously into the background.
Much of a large sign remained as well,
Appearing to be nothing less
Than some leviathan’s abandoned crossword puzzle,
Fairly shouting “THE B ST  DA N STE K
BETW  N SYR C SE  AND OT T WAOR Y UR MON Y B CK!”  
Nothing else remained, my companion intimated,
Save the odd abandoned farmhouse and vestigial fields,
With long unmended barbed-wire fences doing their level best
To contain the ghosts of bygone and unlamented cows.

There were
children, sweethearts
shared Moscows, Odessas;
I told myself Ready, aim but
not fire.

(I hate poets.
They annoy me deeply.)

I.

There are the balladeers,
Working in service of their inner Service,
(Though, despite the seeming impossibility,
Their hackneyed verse is even worse)
Creating tortuous rhyme
Which slows down labyrinthine narratives
Ending up in some deus ex machine
So implausible that it would make Euripides blush
(Most often courtesy of some unforeseen projectile
Or sudden viral contagion;
Would that their creators meet such a fate!)

II.

I come not to praise the so-called sonneteers,
But to bury them.
They are an earnest lot,
(Lord knows that they are earnest)
And they will make their fourteen lines rhyme
(Though sometimes the rhyme scheme screams for mercy)
And hang the cost.
Though their narratives are head-scratching things,
And their iambs proceed with the steadiness
Of a nonagenarian church pianist
Doing her damndest to fight the wedding march to a draw,
They are content, nay, proud of their work
Because babble rhymes with Scrabble
(Though they are not particularly proficient with the latter,
They have the former down to an art.)

III.

Let us not forget the Buk-zombies,
Those apostles of aphorism,
Most of whom speak of their departed deity
As if he were an old drinking buddy
(Never mind that most of them were two or three
Or perhaps not even a bad idea
In the back seat of some mom’s Buick
When he exited this mortal plane, stage left, even.)
One’s mind is boggled whilst considering
The expanse of the bar required to accommodate
Everyone who would like to
(Or worse, have claimed to)
Buy old Charlie a beer, not that he’d stand for a round.
They are a sullen horde, this lot,
Best dealt with by aiming for the base of the skull.

IV.
Ah, the confessionals, Lord have mercy upon their souls
(For they shall have none upon ours.)
They feel so many things so deeply
As such things have never been felt before
(They have not read their Sexton, their Snodgrass,
Their Lowell, their Pl--well, no,
They have all read their Plath.)
It is, from the moment they arise in the morning
Until such time they set aside their fears and let sleep take them,
All too much for them,
And they bravely face the days
Until such time they care bear to take action
And fling themselves from some convenient precipice.
We should, as a service to them and ourselves,
Ensure the soles of their shoes
Are sufficiently worn and slippery.

(I hate poets.
They annoy me deeply.)

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

There is, I admit, no small attraction in the possession
Of the wand--but invariably that becomes obsession,
For magic bewitches all it touches, and woe to the man
Who, having discerned its methods and secrets, believes he can
Employ it yet stay unfettered and unscathed, without effect,
(As if the mere claim of enchantment would not make one suspect
Both the man and his motives), all sweet fruit without bitter rind.
Such men may find the verdict of peers and gods to be unkind,
(There exists no single point in time we fail to comprehend
That no simple act of wizardry postpones our mortal end)
For who among us remains impervious to Nature’s whims
Or time’s ravages--our concentration wanes, the eyesight dims,
Our hands shake, every bit as unsteady as our convictions.
So we carry on, with our exceptions and contradictions
Expertly hidden, in the hopes that, at least for a short while,
We can offset, through the employment of parlor tricks and guile,
The diminution of our gifts, fading of our faculties.
So, as we reach our denouement, what have our abilities
Brought us in the end, save the knowledge that our reputations,
No matter how great, serve as no match for our limitations?

Man, don’t talk that ****--I ain’t but six-eleven, maybe,
But, pretend as he might, Reggie was seven-foot, legit,
And as bad a cat as ever took the court at Eastern High,
But bad off the court, too, took the neighborhood with him,
Wherever he went--man just couldn’t shake Mack Avenue,
And when the pros just decided
He wasn’t worth the trouble any more,
He had nowhere to go but back home, and nothin’ to work with
Save havin’ a big hand to pull a trigger with
(And that wasn’t getting him too far, like there wasn’t anyone
Who didn’t know who Reggie was),
And at some point you end up on the wrong end of the barrel,
Then nothin’ left to do
‘Cept try to wrestle what remained of the man
Into some huge-*** coffin
(Word was Mike Storen from the Pacers paid for it,
Even though Reggie had threatened to shoot his *** on live TV),
And word was when they got him to the graveyard
The coffin wouldn’t fit in the hole straight-in,
So they had to snap off a couple of the handles
And wedge him in all kitty-corner.
Man, I hope that story’s true,
Folks from the neighborhood used to say,
It wouldn’t be Reggie if he went straight.

My worthy adversaries across the dais would have you believe
That, having fashioned mankind in His own image
And, what’s more, sacrificed His own son
For the sole purpose of its collective salvation,
Our Maker would, in effect,
Simply shrug his shoulders and send it on its merry way.
Free to fall, those arguing the negative will tell you.
Ah, but there’s more than that: not only do they insist
That The Creator has for all intents and purposes abandoned us,
But has allowed an equally powerful and diametrically opposed force
To set up shop on his watch.  
I would ask them--what drabble of Scripture,
What logical premise would you cite to support such madness?

But surely, my learned opponents would purr,
(Oh, every bit as sly as devils themselves!)
You would not deny the existence of evil in this world.  
Morons! Can it somehow be possible
That you are completely ignorant of the work of Augustine?  
Tell me, after you finish your warm milk
And button up your snuggly jammies,
When you flick off the light switch, does the dark come out?
Or is your grasp of physics and philosophy equally inadequate?

I suppose, in a last, desperate attempt to buttress their arguments,
The supporters of the opposite position
Will contend my presence in this lecture hall
Is necessary and sufficient  for their argument to carry the day.
I categorically deny the supposition!
I do not exist, nor can I!  
Hang your forensic skills on that,
You bunch of ******* saintly *******.

We need more Martians , they nattered at me all the time,
More monsters—people like to be scared,
As if those callow youngsters,
Growing up with two cars in the garage
And three sets at the country club,
Their fraternity mixers at Whittier or Occidental,
Knew the first **** thing about terror.
Still, they wanted me to grind out the harum-scarum hokum
They enjoyed watching two-reelers on Saturday afternoons
While men were doing hard work in Leyte and Manila,
As if the transitory fear of some ghoulish bogeyman
Would last through the thirty-second epics
Featuring some cartoon bear shilling for beer
Or bunnies extolling the virtues of toilet paper.
Let me tell you what fear is, I would say time and again,
It’s a padlocked fence and a smokestack
Which isn’t churning out a **** thing.
It’s the jobs you can’t get because you said something
(And more likely, you didn’t) twenty years ago.
It’s one more envelope from the bank or the phone company
With bold red lettering on the front
That you don’t open because you know what it says
And how it doesn’t matter one bit,
Because you can’t do a ******* thing about it,
And these promising young men would just look at me
Like I was some poorly made-up extraterrestrial
From one of their Buck ******* Rogers potboilers.

Several of my neighbors here were among the men,
Mostly boys in truth, who marched with the 126th New York,
Taking fire at Petersburg and The Wilderness,
At Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor.
We have spoken about the horrors of war,
The kaleidoscope of confusion and dread,
No direction leading to shelter, no road guiding the way to home.
They have said that, as frightening as the sound of the minie *****,
Zipping overhead like malevolent flies,
And the cannon were, what they found truly awful
Was the manner in which those fields,
So like the ones where they had flushed out quail as children,
Became foreboding nightmare landscapes,
Containing a dark madness
That they never dreamed could have existed.

No one may contest that a contract existed
Between my client and the respondent;
This much is beyond debate,
Nor did the plaintiff in any way compel
This miller’s-daughter-***-queen in any manner,
Unless one contends that providing a vehicle
To obtain all that she had ever desired
Somehow equates to coercion.
As to my learned colleague’s claim
That the imposition of so-called usurious terms by my client
Serves to render the agreement null and void,
May I remind you that at no point in this affair
Did the respondent decline to accept the quid pro quo;
Indeed, she happily re-negotiated the terms of the very pact
She now seeks to vacate!

Ah, opposing counsel claims, my client fulfilled the agreement
In accordance with the law.
I must say, rather sadly,
I find my distinguished friend’s definition of fulfillment
Very odd, indeed, as if the employment of industrial espionage,
Illegal trespass, surveillance methods of dubious legitimacy
(All of which were undertaken
To surreptitiously provide his client with such information
To exercise the out-clause of the agreement)
Is something the court should embrace
As a matter of statute or accepted practice.

Again, members of the jury, I know where your sympathies lie.
All along , opposing counsel has implied
We should celebrate his client’s pluckiness,
Her cunning and initiative,
Her stunning journey from rages to riches.
My friends, I would argue this;
There is, indeed, a moral to every story,
Are our obligations and promises, at the end of the day,
No more than the interview portion of some beauty pageant,
Where long blonde hair and a winning smile
Serve as just cause to blithely disregard those oaths?
Are the most sacred of vows
Less binding upon those whom Nature and the mirror
Have favored more so than those among us
Who are among the unattractive and underloved?
Ladies and gentlemen, it is up to you
To write the final chapter of our fable.
I thank you for your service.

He is in his rooms in the Kenmore Hotel,
Once-gracious lady favored by the ancient city’s elite,
Now tired old harlot patching and spackling with powders and rouges
In a vain attempt to camouflage the slide toward oblivion,
Only fit for unwitting out-of-towners
And those with short-term business transactions to ply
(He stays there out of nostalgia, perhaps,
Or possibly because they’d let him through the door without question
Back when that was far from a given,
Or maybe because it was the trumpet players’ place,
The story being that Bunny Berigan had once left a horn
As payment for an outlandish and fabulously overdue bar tab.)
He is holding court with a local features writer,
Another interview in another town,
(Ostensibly a one-on-one sit-down,
But his suite more like Sears the weekend before Christmas:
Band members doing walk-through warm-ups,
Friends old and new darting in and out,
Lucille frantically mother-henning the whole process)
Juggling many hats as he speaks,
Part-time salesman for semi-herbal quasi-diet aids,
Mirthful mangler of malapropos,
All rolling forth with with an air of street-level entrepreneurship,
But there is a more stolid, settled quality about him now,
The assumption of the mantle of icon
(Bestowed upon him by a continent
Far from his birth, but still)
And the time comes for him to begin the warm-up,
Starting with a high note here, a low note there,
Until he finds one note, that note,
A thing not constrained by lead sheets, acoustics,
Indeed any human construct at all.
On the street outside, two young men,
All stingy brimmed hats, narrow ties,
And not-quite top-line silk mohair suits
(Flipped in and out of the pawn shop
Any number of times, but still)
Shoes shined to a military gleam,
Walking with a gait which implies
That they are hustlers, yes,
But men of substance, nonetheless.
One of them hears the note,
And wonders aloud,
Man, who’s got a horn like that
Around this neighborhood?
(Neither of them deign to look up toward the hotel,
As, for them, threat and opportunity
Is something that exists strictly at street-level)
But his partner grunts dismissively,
Never even breaking stride,
Man, just some old **** fool
Playin’ some old tom’s records.

This is how our dreams end:
Not an avalanche cascading around our ears,
But the subtle shift of pebbles in a stream bed,
An endless series of minute compromises with ourselves
Which we justify to by raising any number of spectres:
The weight of disappointment from unrequited expectation,
The bogeyman of unintended consequence from our successes.
So we make the box of our wishes smaller and then yet smaller,
Until we do not recognize them as ours at all;
Or, perhaps, we have adulterated them so often
We can no longer ascertain
At what point they stopped resembling our hopes and ideals,
Not unlike when the batter, stepping to the plate,
Scratches out the back line of the batter’s box
Until its boundary disappears
Into a confusion of dust and lime.

One final wish, then; scatter me at the crossroads when I die,
So that, if perhaps for only that one moment,
I can rise above the gray and cracked macadam
Of these too-familiar roads
And float into a clear, blue unambiguous sky,
No longer a victim of the gravity
Of the workaday concerns that shackle us together.

Three days, is what the HR rep said, somewhat sheepishly,
As if she was fully aware that boxing up one’s grief
In a span of a few dozen hours
Is a matter of wishful thinking
And certainly she sympathizes
(Indeed, as she speaks,
She spreads her hands in such a way
As you half expect doves to come forth in full flight)
Empathy being their stock in trade,
But the law and the handbook say three days,
And then you need to have your head
******* back on and looking forward.

Eventually, the mail brings fewer envelopes
Marked with embossed flowers
And subdued and tasteful stamps,
The usual flow of solicitous inquiries,
Pre-stamped and pre-sorted,
Inquiring as to your credit needs,
The condition of your windows and siding,
Resumes apace, and more than once,
In fits of inappropriate black humor and frustration,
You scribble, in bold thick strokes of a marker,
The addressee no longer resides at this location.

You return to nine-to-five,
Though your ghosts keep their own hours,
Stopping by to visit on their own schedule alone,
Prompted by the tiniest of things:
The dog scampering to its feet in a hurry,
As if someone was at the door,
The discovery of a long-unused pitching wedge
Standing expectantly in the back of the closet,
A song from long ago which was beloved
When you lived in the pairing mandated by Noah
Before you entered the shadow world of ones and nones.
Sometimes you give into the giddy madness,
And rise to waltz around the room,
Careening about unsteadily, clumsily
As you have yet to completely master
The difference in weight shift and distribution
That is required of a solo act.
The timing of these visitations
Often disrupts your schedule and sleep patterns,
And you think that perhaps tomorrow you’ll call in.

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

As far as these children are concerned,
It is the sky itself that is ringing;
Not knowing how on a very still day such as this,
The moraines and drumlins
Will play catch with the sound of the bells
Emanating from the tiny old church over in Peruville
(Indeed, they are likely unaware the chapel’s existence)
Nor would they give the matter a second thought,
For they have mounted their bicycles,
Pointing spoke-wheeled steeds
Toward the small single-block downtown of their hamlet,
A journey of epic proportions requiring all due haste
(Though, unlike in our day, there is no long hair
Flying unkempt in the breeze,
As we have imposed the sensibilities of helmets upon them)
Though we know it to be a half-mile, at best,
As the crow flies, covered in three, perhaps four minutes,
But they are not concerned in the least
With the mechanics of straight line measurement,
The vagaries of acoustics, the minutiae of glacial residue,
For they have not accumulated the wisdom of the elders,
The practicalities of the sciences,
The ability to construct elaborate boxes of equations
Or any of the other bright, shining theoretical bracelets
Which fit, albeit a tad snugly, on our wrists and ankles.

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

(for dana rushin)

Well, you’ve got have that moon-June thing;
Hard-coded into our DNA, after all,
But if you stop there and say Well, here it is,
You’re just playin’ chopsticks instead of concertos,
Or parsing out Monk on a Fisher-Price piano.
Story’s gotta live and breathe, see,
Just like you and me, got to have a heartbeat,
And if the tale’s told right, done truly,
Well, it’s a light goin’ on for everybody,
Be it little girls (getting the giggles
Or bein’ all mock-stern with you,
Finding a way to work it in some double-dutch rhyme)
Or old-timers, gray-haired and coke-bottle glasses,
Some of them all but blind, leaning on their canes
(But lightly, gracefully, like old soft-shoe men)
And one of them likely to chuckle softly,
And say Yessir, that’s how it is.
You tell it now, son—story’s big as a house,
Big as the whole **** universe.

There are notions which prove impervious
To the forces of nature, the whims of politicians and philosophers
Perhaps even, in the final analysis, to time itself.  
Tell me, what epiphany is realized
Through the parsing of prepositions from the Hebrew or Latin,
Why should we hoot and shake our fists in some battle to the death
Over some microtonal discord lurking behind a bassoon?
What is revealed in the lolling gait of the harlequinesque priest
Promenading down the aisle, incense burner clanking in time?
Observe, rather, the ancient, scarf-clad women among the muzhiks,
Bent as if entreating the very ground itself,
As they feel, smell, taste the soil,
Unearthing what peasants and saints
Believe to be the fingerprints of God,
And what is revealed to them in that rudimentary yet holy act
Is that which brings down Czar and prime minister,
That which exposes the proclamations and directives of commissars
As supercilious cant, the howling of a lost child into the wind.

You’ll not see their like come race season,
Having left the premises to be replaced
By the preening breast-augmented and face-lifted set,
Shaking their heads and clucking sadly if one inquires
If they might have something
A touch smaller than a Franklin in their wallets,
Their smooth patter, replete with references
To Paris junkets and Milan catwalks
Occasionally interrupted by one of their more prosaic counterparts
(Hard-core players following the nags up from Belmont)
Stopping in to partake in one vice they’d sworn off earlier
While loudly disclaiming the other which had ruined
An otherwise perfectly lovely afternoon
(They’ll down their draughts in short order,
Most likely headed for the harness track
To drop a twenty on some longshot
Which bears the name of a long-departed grandmother.)
This time of year, though, they are ubiquitous
As the black and salted slush,
Sad souls slouching in after a bracing walk from Skidmore campus
Or some down-at-the-heels apartment on Alger Street,
Forlornly popping into some quiet booth
With the familiar long-distance stare seen in those
Beginning to grasp the truth that one
Is an object of prey in a very small pond indeed
(Likely a semester, no more than two certainly,
From having their undergraduate epaulets
Torn unceremoniously from their shoulders)
Being as quiet and unobtrusive as church mice
Until a half-dozen or so Coors Lites
Leads them to pontificate on the injustice of the universe
And if they have not decided to stagger home
Or degenerated into desolate tears of self-pity,
They are wont to dispute the existence of the Almighty,
Saying with a conviction which would be impressive
If expressed by Beelzebub himself
That he does not exist, that he cannot exist,
Though the body of proof cited in support of the proposition
Tends to be fragmented and rife with circular reasoning
(We know that they’re most likely drinking with false ID,
But they are invariably pedestrians—let them have their moment,
Only threats to themselves, after all.)
As for myself, I’m of the opinion that faith in the Hereafter
Is that rarest of bets, an absolute bet-the-chalk- dead- cert
Where you walk to the betting window clutching house money.

An old boy named Billy Joe Clyde
Took hisself a lovely young bride
But he had several vices
Plus herbs and secret spices
And ate the lass Kentucky fried.

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

He’d always had the fastball.
It was, according to the second-tier phys ed teachers
And young, un-tenured math instructors
Who comprised the area’s high school coaching community,
Unlike any pitch they’d ever seen,
And the hapless shortstops and left-fielders
Who meekly waved in its general direction as it crossed the plate
Simply shook their heads, glared out toward the mound,
Or, in the case of one chunky red-haired clean-up hitter
From up in Clearfield,
Threw a bat at him in a mix of embarrassment and frustration.
(He’d simply stood on the mound,
Grinning as the piece of wood sailed harmlessly by,
And he’d yelled back in at their bench,
Listen you bunch of woodchucks,
There ain’t nothing you can do to me
With a bat in your hands no way no how.)

His success was uninterrupted, unparalleled,
With no taint of failure or adversity
(He’d always told the scouts who asked him to pitch from the stretch
Mister, when I’m pitching, ain’t nobody gets on base.)
And when he’d signed his contract,
Which included a bonus of twenty-five hundred dollars
(Little more than chump change to the ballclub,
But all the **** money in the world to him),
He’d figured it was just the first step
In an inexorable process to the big time
The possibility that he could be no more than an afterthought
Never so much as crossing his mind,
But though he had the fastball, it was no more imposing
Than several dozen other pitchers in the organization,
And it had the tendency to be straight as a string
On its journey to home plate,
Easy prey for players who had grown up
Facing good pitching twelve months a year,
And his other offerings
(The notion of needing a Plan B on the mound
Having scarcely occurred to him)
Were rudimentary and unpolished things,
Child-like roundhouse curves,
Change-ups which announced themselves
Long before they ever left his hand,
Plus lacked what the scouts and developmental types
Liked to call a “projectable body”,
No six-foot-six, no frame that spoke of growth and untapped power.
He still had the dream, but offered the big club little to dream upon.

He spent a couple of years in short-season ball in Upstate New York,
(In a small, down-on-what-little-luck-it-ever-had city
Where the right field fence
Butted up against a maximum security prison)
Cleaning up the messes in blowout losses,
Soaking up innings on cold, damp early June evenings
In places like Watertown or Little Falls,
Where the threat of frost lingered almost until the summer solstice,
So that those arms which were part of the big team’s future wouldn’t be put at risk, Spending his late mornings and later evenings
In any number of identical shopping malls, Super 8’s and Comfort Inns,
Bars named The Draught Dodger or Pub-N-Grub,
Where the women of one A.M. appeared to be intoxicating, glamorous,
But were all dark roots and crow’s feet
In the grainy light of early morning,
Pale tell-tale halos on the left ring-finger,
The redhead of Erie indistinguishable from the blonde in Oneonta.

He knew that he was simply a spare part, a body to fill out a roster,
But come his third spring with the organization,
He’d asked--begged, really--for another full season,
One final shot to make good,
But the farm director just sat back and smiled ruefully.
Son, he said after a seemingly endless pause,
We’re all pretty much day-to-day.
After a few weeks back Upstate
(He’d only pitched once, to one batter,
Who he ended up walking on four pitches),
A new crop of polished collegians and high-school hotshots
Were signed on the dotted line and ready to roll,
And one night, just before the team bus was leaving for Batavia,
He was called in to the manager’s office,
Where he heard what he had dreaded,
But knew was coming as sure as sunrise:
End of the line, kid.
We have to let you go.

So he went home.  
He’d laid low at first,
Dodging the polite small talk or wordless looks
Which all boiled down to What are you doin’ back here?
Eventually, he emerged from his old bedroom at home,
And if someone at the Market Basket or the bar at the Kinzua House
Asked him what went wrong,
He’d shrug and say he’d got caught in a numbers game,
Or it was politics--The guys they spend a million bucks on
get a million chances, Y’know?
But he knew that for those kids
Who had never been good enough to dream,
The notion that Bobby Rockett couldn’t make it
Said something about their own futures
Which was too bleak, too awful to contemplate.


A couple of weeks after he was home,
His official release arrived in the mail,
The ballclub’s logo all but jumping off the envelope,
Bold , bright gold star with one point tailing off
In a hail of inter-stellar dust, comet-like, into nothingness.
He hadn’t bothered to open it before he chucked it into the trash bin
(Though he almost immediately regretted its loss,
His playing career already a different life,
With few tangible bits of proof to prove he’d been someone, something.)
He supposed he’d go get a job at the mill,
Or maybe go into selling insurance with his dad,
And there was always a pretty good semi-pro league in Pittsburgh
If he got the jones to do some pitching
(Still, that was a two hour drive each way,
And somehow he never just got around to doing that.)
Some nights, just before sunset,
He would drive out to the high school ballfield
Glove and bucket of ***** in hand,
And, wearing a good landing spot with his battered spikes,
He would throw (the motion so easy, so clean,)
Pitch after pitch across the plate,
The knowledge that his velocity was more or less undimmed
Leading him to smile grimly, almost conspiratorially to himself
As throw after throw rattled the backstop,
Sounding for all the world like so many metallic crows
Settling into a grove of scrub trees on a late August evening,
The nights growing imperceptibly longer
As they proceeded inexorably toward autumn.

There’s many legends told of those who tended to the nets
Whose talents brought grown men to tears, made bookies hedge their bets.
One man’s special gift was to make the goal lamp glow
Therein begins the woeful tale of Red Light Racicot.

The story starts at Granby in Quebec’s junior ranks,
Where pimply youths have slapshots which seem fired from tanks,
And flashy cat-quick goaltenders will often steal the show;
Alas, no such heroics came from Red Light Racicot.

The ease he was beat stick-side left his goalie coaches dumb.
Granby supporters prayed as one that they would trade the ***
They called him “Ancient Mariner” (stopping one in three or so),
Surely Les Habitants would not sign Red Light Racicot.

But indeed, Les Canadiens dragooned him in the draft,
Fully convincing one and all that Serge Savard was daft.
Children throughout the province prayed Dear merciful God, No!
Don’t let our Forum bear the taint of Red Light Racicot.

But then came a stretch where Patrick Roy’s work had been poor,
And Hayward and Vinny Riendeau had each been shown the door.
And Montreal fans heard the saddest words they’d ever know:
…Starting in goal this evening is Red Light Racicot.

He flailed at wobbly wristers and wound up on his ****.
And gave up much more five-hole than any village ****.
Even cross-check befogged Savard knew it was time to go
And mercifully, he released poor Red Light Racicot

In Heaven there’s a glowing rink where gods of hockey skate:
Maurice Richard, Howie Lorenz, all of the truly great.
In one net, Georges Vezina makes saves with stick and toe
But someday they’ll all float soft goals past Red Light Racicot.

These trips by the county boys,
Being further deputized as burly, armed elves
Tended toward the grim,
Taking them on roads way up in the hills
Where pavement was the stuff of fantasy
And the home-sweet-homes
Were ancient pock-mark and rusted single-wides
Or jerry-built additions uneasily affixed
To some abandoned hunting camp or outbuilding,
Third-hand rugs or tarps covering
Hard ground, possibly augmented with a sprinkle of sawdust,
And you learned not to do more than exchange hellos
With the parents (this just one more minor indignity,
One more for-today-only handout,
The toxic mixture of resentment and self-recrimination
Never far from the surface) and head for the kids
As quickly as politeness allowed, the smiles
(Sometimes positively beatific, others suitably wan,
Knowing that tomorrow would be another day
In a series of just another days)
And upon leaving one such place, a couple of the boys
Heard an incongruous tinkling, this place
Far enough from town and insulated by bluff and pine woods
Where it couldn't be from St, Mary's or Faith Baptist,
And turning the corner toward where they were parked,
They happened upon a black bear,
Improbably wakened and wandered from some nearby cave,
Toying with some improvised wind chime,
Comprised of old graters, 50s-issue percolator stems,
Silverware liberated from some Denny's or school cafeteria,
And as they backed away to seek
Some alternate path to their vehicle, the younger of the pair opined
Must be some angel getting his wings, hey?
To which his partner, who knew these hills
And their sundry denizens all too well replied
You get that bears attention,
You're mebbe gonna find yourself on the waiting list.

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

We’d known him, back in the day
At dear old Millard Fillmore Elementary,
As Three-Desks Tommy, highly imaginative monicker
Deriving from his decidedly unimaginative first name
And the fact that he, indeed, had three desks,
Each of them stuffed chock-full
With uncounted numbers of pencils and erasers,
Any number of homework papers
(Usually A’s and A-pluses,
Though there were the odd B’s and B-minuses as well,
As he was a bright, in fact inordinately bright, child,
But sometimes given to sloppiness and stray pencil marks
And a predilection for not reading the directions completely)
Eerily accurate renditions of dinosaurs,
Wildly inventive stories featuring rainbow-hued dragons,
Noble and voluble talking bovines,
And knights and knaves of every size, shape, and suzerain,
Stories which resided cheek-to-jowl with some bit of uneaten sandwich
Until such time it made its existence
Abundantly clear to the custodial staff.
We’d never stopped to think much about his miniature Maginot Line;
It was what Tommy did and had always done
For as long as we could remember,
Though there were some teachers and an assistant principal or two
Who thought the whole thing was permissive bordering on coddling
(His teacher was a veteran of the wars, and well-insulated by tenure,
But she had grown weary of over-glasses glares and snide asides
When Tommy’s name came up in the staff room,
A death by a thousand cuts and all that),
And one day, while moving one of his desks
To clear space for Simon Says,
It had caught on a sticky spot,
Overturning onto a soon-to-be-fractured toe.
When he came back to school, accompanied by an ungainly cast
And an equally ungainly pair of crutches, his teacher took him aside.
Tommy, she purred, Maybe someone is trying to tell you something.
The other kids all make due with one desk,
And I’m sure you can find a way to as well, don’t you, Tommy?
So Tommy embarked on a great cleansing of his little fiefdom,
Filling several garbage cans with his collected works,
(Math papers and mastodons, bologna and Brobdingnagians)
And afterward he’d kept himself to one standard desk,
Duly filing, returning, and circular-filing his paperwork
As the occasion demanded
(Though one time Murph Dunkirk
Asked Three-Desks if he minded downsizing;
Tommy just shrugged, and said Well, it’s better than a broken foot)
And maybe in his dreams he had a thousand desks,
A thousand tops to fling open,
A thousand repositories for light and legend
Or perhaps he never gave it so much as a second thought,
No way to know now, one supposes,
Though if anything out of the ordinary had come his way,
We would’ve probably heard.

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

She simply rolls her eyes and shakes her head
If, on one those rare occasions she is socializing
With social as opposed to business acquaintances
(Daylight hours with single women,
Naturally of a certain laissez-faire outlook as to certain businesses)
Someone brings up the notion of the ****** with the heart of gold;
You do not, speaking in a voice
Residing in the interval
Between a purr and a growl,
Get into the game for the purpose of ministry.
Indeed, she will note
Half-jokingly, half-ruefully,
That the major difference between her job a
And those working the third shift
At the Kendall refinery was the differing nuances
In future health-related consequences.

She is, for a businesswoman,
Possessed of a significant number of quirks,
Having no interest whatsovever
In the abnormal or unduly physically challenging,
Despite the higher potential renumeration
(Honey, you’ll never have enough money for that,
She will demur if the horse-trading turns to such specialty items)
Nor will she engage in congress or commerce
With the upper- management types
From the city’s few prosperous terms
(For reasons she will not nor likely cannot explain)
And she is notably fond,
Possibly to the point of lunacy,
Of lacing her small talk
With scripture and bon mots;  
Indeed, one wall of the men’s room at the Zippo factory
Is devoted solely to various quotes and scraps of verse
She has uttered to her patrons
Who punch the clock at the plant,
And more than one of the boys has said
She’s a pretty **** good piece, even at her age,
But sometimes you wish to Christ
She’d just lay there and be quiet.

It was not impossible that she could have taken another direction,
0r, at least, worked her chosen field on a slightly different plane;
She had been, in her prime, quite stunning
And in possession of both a quick wit and certain presence
That would have nicely augmented the arm
Of those who lived in the rarified strata
(Or at least as high-falutin
As one can be in a small oil-boom town)
Who possessed a combination of money, prestige,
And the inside knowledge that rules and sacred vows
Applied only to sheep and losers.
She chose (a clear and conscious choice, no doubt as to that)
To cast her lot with a humbler set;
The foreman, the mechanic, the assembler on the line
The stooped and gentle florist
Whose sole payment to her was a lifetime of free arrangements
From his small store on Bon Air Avenue
(I tried to lock him into
The floral tribute at my funeral, she once said,
But he seemed to think that would be inappropriate.)

No one, even those in her very small circle of friends,
Seemed to know why she had spurned
The easier road of the demi-acceptable courtesan;
She had given no indication that she saw herself
As some slightly tarnished saint,
One of those so-called angels with ***** faces
(Indeed, she had often made a point of saying
There was no good to be done in her particular line of work),
And she was not forthcoming about her curriculum vitae,
Although it was common knowledge
She was raised a strict Catholic,
And it was said she had a brother
Who was in the care of the state,
Though it was an open question  
As to whether that was in the medium security pen at Foster Brook
Or the bughouse in Kane.  
In any case, as she was want to say
A ***** is the last person you ask
To find the answers to the mysteries of the universe,
After which she would launch
Into a story about how Father Mulligan,
The blustery, movie-Irish priest of her youth,
Was known to be the absolute biggest cheater
To ever set a pair of spikes
Onto the greens at the Bradford Country Club,
Or how the gangster Legs Diamond,
Who would just as soon shoot you as to look at you,
Was known to be the most generous tipper
Ever to patronize the once-grand hotel in Albany
Where her maiden aunt had been,
Once upon a time, a cocktail waitress.

You’d had just enough change to pick it up at the Hall’s gift shop,

As you’d ate sparsely at the down-on-its luck diner

Where the bus had stopped halfway or so through the trip out

(Just as well, given the place’s obvious indifference

To culinary innovation and cleanliness)

And you’d all but sprinted with it

From the cashier straight o the batting cage next door,

Inadvertently ending up in line for the machine

Which threw curveballs

(The kids ahead of you older, most likely high school players

Who made but weak contact with the pitches,

A dream dying a little with each weak tapper and foul-back)

And you went through a handful of futile swings

Before the final pitch came out of the machine,

Spinning oddly and refusing to break toward the plate,

Hitting you in the back with a dull, rubbery thud,

And your teacher, thick-middle man

Who had played a couple seasons in the Indians farm system,

Where he had faced Juan Pizarro (Son, his hook looked

Like it was coming in from first base)

Chuckled softly as he rubbed your back,

Saying It’s like I told you, kid,

This is a hard game.

My Dearest Capulet,

As I write you in these waning hours
(The number of my sunrises and sunsets finite,
Easily counted upon either hand)
I do so resigned to the certainty
That this missive shall remain unanswered,
Most likely forever unread--but tell me, dear lady
To whom else would I address this correspondence,
For who else is more likely to understand
That love and hate are not opposite poles,
But are as the hissing, slathering jaws
Of that dreadful two-headed snake,
Which, if not separated by a prudent interval,
Will consume the other and then itself.
I have lived and learned this quite well
(At the hands of teachers and other lesser men)
And pondered other questions of fatality and fidelity,
Surmising that rings of gold and fetters of iron
Are neither necessary nor sufficient.

If I have not come to peace with my fortune, distant soul mate,
I have at least procured a measure of acquiescence,
For I have known love and hate and death,
Known them thoroughly enough to comprehend
That they are not wholly separate entities,
And that they will often appear at one’s door
Wearing the formal attire of one of the others.
I have burned, brightly if not in illumination,
And now I am spent, a charred celestial body
Rotating ever more slowly
Until a final, silent, unobserved obsolescence,
For after we have loved profoundly if not well,
What is left to us but the sepulcher?

I remain faithfully yours,

When you appear (as we all shall, no doubt)
Before the oldest judge in the world,
Take care to notice his appearance;
You’ll see that his robe is frayed about the collar,
And that the cuffs, though expertly repaired,
Are worn and threadbare,
For he has been upon the bench for what seems eons,
(Case files scattered about heedlessly, his gavel mislaid)
And though you beseech him
With your borrowed chants and learned pleadings,
It is unlikely that he shall do anymore than look up imperceptibly
Dismissing you with a short, disdainful wave of his hand,
For your case is like a thousand others,
And your entreaties and supplications
No longer interest him.

I can understand, then, you would find such thoughts
Sobering, Indeed disconcerting;
It is not necessarily pleasant to realize
That we are but as toy boats which,
Once pushed away from shore by some small boy
Soon distracted by other, shinier trinkets,
Drift aimlessly across a pond
Which offers neither shelter nor safe harbor.
We are, then, all on our own,
Misbegotten creatures linked together
By nothing more noble of purpose
Than our own self-interest;
Oh, do not misunderstand me,
For I am not advocating (Heaven forbid!)
Some wholesale violation of commandments:
The spectre of patricide,
The hair-trigger roiling of the blood brought to bear
By the untrustworthy business partner, the faithless lover.  
I merely suggest it is wise to remember
That as we float along the stream of this life
(It being rank and  befouled, chock-a-block
With garbage, broken bottles, discarded condoms)
No hand is on the tiller save our own.  
But enough of this dark and dour philosophy!
Let us finish our draughts and return to our rooms,
There to sleep the sleep of the just,
During this long winter’s night
Which seems all but without end.

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

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

There was, in a once upon another time a man
(His name and work
Being lost to the boot sales and dustbins of time)
Who made a reputation as a portrait painter,
One transcending his small town in Schleswig-Holstein,
Spreading among the surrounding principalities.
Gifted with curious abilities (although he would demur,
Protesting that he was simply a man with a brush and a palette)
Allowing him to secure the favor
Of the area’s more substantial citizens,
Providing him leisure to commit to canvas
The faces of the ordinary
And, if some cases, somewhat iniquitous.
His portfolio a crazy-quilt of his milieu,
Subjects back-to-back in no particular order:
Princes and flower girls, priests and ******.


The sterling reputation the painter enjoyed
Was not due simply to technical skill
(He was, to be sure, expert in matters of shading and line,
And his eye for color and detail no less than remarkable)
But also an eye for those things
Revealed in the curve of the lips or the set of the eyes
And, more importantly for fame and purse,
The virtuosity to enhance the understated gifts
Or veil those unpleasant secrets they suggested.
And so, the venality in the banker’s sneer
Was softened to intimate nothing more
Than levelheaded concern for the sanctity of the mark and guilder,
Or the gentle smile of the prince’s youngest daughter
Augmented to evoke the beatitudes of the angels themselves.

The craft and subtlety of his work
Combined to engender the most curious effects;
Oftentimes his subjects, surely without consciousness or intent,
Began to assume those qualities  
Bestowed upon them by the nuances of line and pigment,
Becoming less parsimonious or more humane,
As dictated by the brush strokes,
Carrying on from that time forward as the finest embodiments
Of that visage captured inside the gilding of the frame.

At some point in time,
Whether through the onset of some trickle of madness,
Or perhaps just sheer whimsy,
The painter made a peculiar change in his methodology,
Beginning to graft qualities onto his subjects
Which they never embodied nor hoped to possess,
Perhaps in the hope that, having pinned them to the corkboard,
His butterflies might take wing,
But his command of light and pigment
Combined power and understatement in such a manner
That no one who sat for him ever noticed
They were being mocked or enriched, as the case might be;
And still the canvases acted as tails wagging the dog about;
Priests were found dead in their rectories,
In the midst of tableaus of unspeakable debauchery,
While courtesans lit candles and kneeled in pews
Until their backs and thighs screamed
In the service of such highly unusual positions,
Or the banker flipped the urchin a coin
While gently petting the boy’s undernourished cur,
And perhaps it was all due to the machinations of the painter,
But he would, with just a hint of slyness
Playing about the corners of his eyes and mouth,
Deny any measure of culpability.
He was, after all, just a man with a brush.

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

We have the full complement of the requisite barriers:
Barbed wire, barren landscape, unpleasant canines,
Stark metallic towers with vaguely menacing turrets and gunsights
(Though they are remote, poorly lighted,
Perched high enough that I suspect they may be occupied
By mannequins or scarecrows),
And what cannot be attained physically
Is augmented by other means,
Breakfasts at mid-day, bits of bread in the blackest part of night,
Light as dark, dark as light.
We tell our company this and that of the news of the world:
Half–and-quarter-truths, innuendos of some plausibility,
Outright truths as well, but told with the most outrageous leers,
Put forth in a tone which suggest that such things could never be,
(I have come to appreciate Pilate’s question,
For truth is a singular thing,
Valid within the limits of one’s mind,
No more than a lower-case notion
When butting up against those of others),
And I tell myself that this is all something that needs to be done,
That perhaps there is no greater good
Than a certain regularity,a certain order of things,
But I am unsettled by the memory of an episode
Some three days past, where one of this assemblage
(I suspect the person in question was female,
But we keep our band well-shorn, and they are costumed
In rather shapeless and gray tunics
Which, given the lapse of time
And the long intervals between our own re-supply,
Look suspiciously like our own garments)
Look in my direction with what fervor she could muster,
All but barking You! You will be forgiven none of this!
And I was left perplexed by her admonition,
Which, as I began to readying myself for dinner
(Scrubbing my neck, my face, my hands,
Trying to rid myself of the damnable dust
Which is omnipresent, unavoidable, beyond eradication)
Lingered, as I could not for the life of me
Comprehend the calculus which would mark me,
A relative speck, a cog, a mere functionary,
As the one to be singled out.

It has been stamped with dispassionate blue ink,
Signifying its future lack of suitability to sit on the shelves,
Having been elbowed aside by this and that year’s thing
(And the book had not been checked out since the mid-seventies,
Perhaps some young man all but short-circuited
By the prospect of a bathing Julie Christie,
Or some female counterpart shedding bell-bottomed tears
Over doomed love, which, in her cosmology,
All such things were fated to be)
Placed in some temporary cardboard casket
Which once held bananas or copier paper or ancient time cards,
Sitting cheek to elbow with cookbooks, breathless biorhythm tomes,
Buffeted about forces unseen and beyond its control
As it faces the uncertain and uneasy prospect of possible reclamation.

Well, some you lay, and some you marry,
(As if womankind is some thing
To be sifted, sorted, and graded
Like so many eggs or lima beans)
But then one comes, smudging all those lines in her wake,
Scattering such easy dichotomies to the winds
Like so many dandelion seeds,
A woman seemingly composed of nothing save some essence,
Yet substantial, fecund, prolific,
And you find yourself wholly unmoored
By no more than a glimpse of her,
The mere imagining of a word wafted your way
A thing of inexplicable delight,
An ecstasy all but *******,
But such dreams serve nothing more tangible
Than as reminders of your utter unworthiness,
Your tainted admixture of rank brass and tuna-can metal,
And so you vow to re-cast yourself
Into something which is worthy of her,
Or at least something demi-desirable,
But such a remaking proves your unmaking,
A transformation not of as the humble cocoon,
But one that leaves you cartoonish, less than a man,
Braying and barking, not even worthy of the scorn
Of she for whom you forsook everything
And yet you would do so again and again,
The bewitching and utter annihilation of all you were
A grail unto itself, an immaculate radiance
Which the tips of you fingers, the brush of your lips
Would leave irreparably sullied.

The casket was coming up, swaying and wobbling
Like a novice skater’s layover spin,
The workings proceeding apace,
The stillness of the August heat
Punctuated by disinterested growl of the backhoe,
The occasional out-of-place jocularity by the excavators
The creaky jingle of the chains holding the muddied box
As it proceeded skyward in its clumsy poor-man’s Resurrection.
The affair was being observed by an elderly couple,
Old enough to be of no particular age.  
Their car had Carolina plates,
But their inflections, their casually-tossed idioms
They noted that ruefully The grass needs mowed)
Marked them as natives.
They’d returned (Last time, most likely,
The wife uttered mournfully)
To take their son with them; he’d drowned when was five? six?
(The years will do that to a body, apparently)
In Kinzua Creek some half-century ago,
Back when little boys weren’t under a mandate
To be safe from themselves, as it were.  
He was our boy! We’ve never forgotten him!
The old man said, the words snapping off
In a manner that spoke of something else altogether,
How the whistle at the Montmorenci
Went off at three and eleven for second shift,
And your *** had better be there,
As those were good jobs that didn’t wait for bereavement leave,
Because there was always someone
Just itching to take your spot on the line,
And anyway life went on,
At least in the sense that television screens went all to snow
And tires went flat and fuses blew
And eventually a dead child
Is not always in the forefront of your thoughts,
Only tiptoeing in when the Press ran a picture
Of the Montmorenci Area Class of whenever,
Or there was an item about some other family
Who opened their front door
To a grim sheriff’s deputy with his hat in his hand.  
Eventually, after some time
And in defiance of both the odds and gravity,
The casket was settled into the back
Of the undertaker’s huge old black Caddy,
And the couple cane-toddled back to their car,
Following out the through the old spider-like gates
And onto the main road.
The brief procession fading from sight,
Until there was nothing left to see
Save the hillsides covered in old growth pine.

Above the Arctic Circle, where the Laplanders dwell,
A place where sunlight never melts the tundra’s icy shell
And Beelzebub himself eschews, strongly preferring Hell.
Yet evil is no stranger here
Due to a beast the natives fear:
The dragon of Parikkala.

The provincial church was burgled, a most confounding case
Church poor boxes relieved of gold and scattered ‘round the place
The cleric who resided there was gone without a trace.
‘Twas nothing the good priest would do
The evidence all pointed to
The dragon of Parikkala.

The sheriff was a bruiser by the name Jyl Purrakut
Rumored to be the owner of a house of ill repute
Such assertions (quite naturally) he’d angrily dispute:
Not down to me, he’d all but hiss,
You know who is to blame for this
The dragon of Parikkala.

Banker Aric Toskala charged outlandish interest rates,
And those who did not pay on time met most unhappy fates,
Tossed rudely from their homes and forced to sleep on sewer grates
Confronted, Aric explained why
It seems his brain was addled by
The dragon of Parikkala.

Young Jana Makkarainen, from a fine family in town
Was victimized unknowingly, her life turned upside-down
Resulting in a swelling underneath her simple gown.
My maidenhood, the girl would cry
Was cruelly stolen from me by
The dragon of Parikkala.

In this cold, humble northern burgh, sin is the soup du jour
Although the town folk, one and all, are wholly chaste and pure
And so a host of gloomy fates they stoically endure
Yet they are blameless in the least
The fault lies wholly with the beast
The dragon of Parikkala.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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