They prefer if you don’t come in the normal entrance,
Where your actions and demeanor may generate
A semblance of disquietude and anxiety for those clients
With simple dislocations and the de riguer colicky infants.
Instead, you are directed to an inconspicuous doorway
Around the back by the dumpsters and empty pallets
To an unadorned room with to fill out the requisite paperwork
(Which proves quite difficult because you’re shaking;
Most likely because the room is so cold,
Or the folding chairs prove ancient and unstable),
Upon receipt of which they allow you
(Although this go-round
There’s no inked footprints or photo provided)
To take your baby back home.

As children, we learned those truths we needed to know
At the feet of claymation wise men
(Proffered to us through the good graces of Rankin and Bass)
That under-appreciated misfits will receive their reward in due time,
That Mommy and Daddy will sit,
Smiling as without a care in the world,
At the kitchen table with brother and sis
Over a piping hot breakfast forever and ever, amen
Before they adjourn to the shiny tree
Surrounded by legions of dolls, brigades of fire engines
(For Santa shall never disappoint any good boy or girl),
That children shall always bury their parents.
I now know that the snowman lied,
And that when he is removed from refrigeration,
He shall not reappear as the strong, substantial man of snow,
But become merely a puddle,
Then mist rising from the sidewalk,
As invisible as the ditties children sing
While jumping double-dutch,
As fleeting as a hug in the dark
After you’ve chased the monsters from under the bed.

You move beyond the luxury of panic,
Beyond the realm of heroic measure,
To such a point where clarity is superseded,
Itself a linear matter and beneath further concerns,
Beyond cursing yourself for failing to heed
Such self-imposed caution as had taken you this far,
And a life does not flash before ones eyes
As much as thoughts and images
Hopscotch into consciousness
Without a particular plan or pattern:
The party you left early, being under strict orders
To be home at such-and-such a time,
Only to be greeted by your mother
Who seemed genuinely surprised
You would take such strictures to heart,
Sundry boxes carried out of sundry workplaces
Under an equally broad array of circumstances,
Times you'd laid back upon the ground,
Looking at the clouds as or like a child
With no rationale save that it seemed like a fine thing,
Any number of snippets trodding on each side of the line
Separating memory and hallucination,
Wondering at last how a body mostly composed of water
Comes to such a pass,
And then there is nothing but.

They'd lived on the flats, humdrum home in a prosaic town.
Those gabled edifices perched on hilltops
Beyond their means, perhaps,
But certainly beyond their needs;
Their children had cribbed at the foot of their bed
To the detriment of sleep and other night-time activities,
And they'd later shared a room, learning early on
That life was often a make-do vocation,
But could be rife with joys in spite of that.
The kids moved on, to mirth and mortgages of their own,
Their parents resolute in their desire to stay put,
Eschewing the siren song of some trailer court in Sarasota,
Some gator-patrolled condo in St. Pete,
Choosing to confront the seemingly never-ending residue
Of stubborn low pressure systems
Lugubriously wandering up the St. Lawrence valley
For weeks upon end,
The humidity and mosquito-laced all too brief summers
(Though, on those nights where no pop-up thunderstorm
Threatened to chase them back inside,
They would sit on the porch, peering at the gravelly old hills,
And he would whistle some tune from some long ago,
Perhaps pulling her out of her chair,
Dancing a slow and somewhat unsteady waltz
While he did his damnedest to stay on key.)

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

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

You’d like to think such work was done by stolid, silent monks
Quilling ancient parchment in some great hall,
Stilted shafts of sunlight filtered by primordial dust,
Incense wafting on unseen breezes as only incense can,
Time measured in the tap of finger cymbals, the odd table-top gong,
But the reality was, as reality is wont to be,
The very essence of mundane:
An unprepossessing warehouse in an unremarkable neighborhood
In a better-days-gone-by northeastern city
All high ceilings, fluorescent lighting, owlish men and women
Hunched over not-quite-obsolescent Macs,
Rifling through squat, square metal cabinets
Filled to overflow with sundry clippings and clip-art,
Fighting deadlines and technical demons
In order to have camera-ready copy done in time
To meet the narrow print window of the small newspaper
Which committed these noble teachings to paper
(The pressmen watching them quick-step the plates in,
Bemused to an extent, but a print job is a print job is a print job.)

All of this in the past of course,
Certain things being pedestrian yet inexorable,
The newspaper falling victim to the nuances of readership and ROI,
The improbability of top-line growth, the inevitability of retrenchment,
Its press operations shut down and moved elsewhere,
The old press bay converted to the most micro of micro-business,
A concern selling chocolates and other sweets
(One assumes His Holiness is unaware of such events,
Although you’d hope that he would, upon hearing the tale,
Smile that particular smile, thousand-watt yet somewhat inscrutable,
And golf-clap his hands and chuckle, Sweeeet.  Ah, sweet.)

She played, as I remember, quite well,
Her talent settling into some interval
Between “capable” and “professional,”
A knack which would have allowed her
To play coffeehouses at some middling state school,
Or accompany some infant’s lilting lullaby,
But she’d set up shop, as it were,
In rather unusual and commercially unpromising spots:
Less-traveled side streets, the odd dead-end and cul-de-sac,
Even the occasional unpaved byway
(I’d first encountered her, during my walking, brooding stage
On a hilly road just outside the village,
At a point where the tarmac took
An unplanned two-hundred-foot vacation.)
She’d set up as if she expected a crowd,
Case open like two upward palms to receive a cascade of change,
And she performed songs designed to please the masses:
Beatles hits, folk ditties our parents sang to us as little ‘uns
For which I rewarded her with a dime here, a quarter there,
And, once and once only,
A fiver I’d snuck out of my father’s wallet
(He took it out of my hide, and then some)

There had been no romance, per se;
I’d sat close to her, hand on a Levi-ed knee,
And there was the odd kiss, as much brotherly as anything else,
But there were understood limits, never spoken of,
As there was something in her bearing, her posture, her very essence
Which said This is what is, what shall be, and what only ever can be.
A reticence which exercised dominion over all things
(The whys and wherefores over her very presence an Exhibit A;
She said she lived over in Wilcox, but she had no car, no bike,
And that particular irritant in the highway
A good six miles off as the crow flies)
So there was little now, and even less could be,
As it was my final summer of a single, uncomplicated home address,
Being bound elsewhere for the first
In a series of institutions of higher education,
So there was no ever after, happily or otherwise.
I’d never heard what happened to her after that,
Where she may have gone, what may have become of her,
Unaware of any tragic event engendering heart-rendering fiction,
But midway through my freshman year, one of the town newsletters
(Mimoegraphed back-and-front missives
Which my mother sent religiously)
Noted that the last unpaved road in the township
Had  finally been blacktopped,
Which I celebrated, in a fashion,
With a ****** heroic in intent and scope
Ending, as such things often do,
In a near-compulsive fit of weeping,
And my fellow revelers asked Man, what the hell has gotten into you?
And I suspect it was being bereft of an answer
Which had set me off in the first place.

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

He nurses his coffee, by himself most days,
Occasionally with the one or two others
Constituting the bulk of the clientele of the diner
(Low-slung building both faceless and nameless
Although those who remember a day
When the village was at least borderline prosperous
Still refer to it as “Kitty’s Place”,
Though its namesake has been dead and gone some two decades)
One of the few going concerns which implausibly remain,
Seemingly through nothing more than sheer inertia,
In the drab little downtown along Canton Street.

He languishes over his cup for as long as the mood hits him,
There being no discernible reason to hurry
(Indeed, the diner itself, once open before sunrise
Now dark and silent until a leisurely seven-thirty or so)
His place not really a working farm these days,
Just a smattering of beef cattle
(Milking and stripping out more than he can manage now)
And what acreage of corn he can get in the ground.
Eventually, he totters out of the front door,
One sleeve of his shirt rolled and pinned up
(Its former occupying member removed
After the incident with the ancient and malevolent corn binder),
Moving toward his truck with an all-but-one-legged gait,
His left-leg jigsaw-puzzled
By an overturned Farmall some time back
(Most days he reckoned he’d tipped the tractor
By failing to shift his balance to accommodate driving one-armed,
Though if he was in a black enough mood he’d put it down
To an old Iroquois curse placed on the entire St. Lawrence valley.)

One could say, if he was a poet
Or some other **** philosophical fool,
That these partial sacrifices served
To ward off some even more awful finality.
He would have none of that, of course—in his own cosmology
The gods and demons most likely have bigger fish to fry,
And, as to the prospect of some inexorable wreck and ruin,
He is of the opinion that what he was given up to this point
Is both ample and sufficient.

Consider, if you will, the fullness of all
Which Nature has made, seemingly infinite in variety
Its endless permutations randomly arrayed
In such a manner that science and piety
Would concur that its bounty is to be enjoyed
For nothing more than its boundless, lovely inscrutability
Yet its works exhibit a consistency
To be employed in the service of mankind,
A felicitous though unacknowledged design
Enabling the manufacture of such potions,
Such poultices designed to bend the wills of men
As they are, regrettably, such malleable, lightweight notions,
Not given to steadfastness or certainty of action
The upshot of which sadly proved beyond my ken,
A final, fatal blunder, a failing to sufficiently consider
That man lacks the stability of the simple hyacinth
And what he has created, God shall put asunder.

i.

I remember, when I was a much younger girl,
How my grandfather would hold a kopek in his hand
And, making it flutter slowly as if it were in flight
Would pantomime dropping it into a small sack,
Kicking a horseshoe or barrel stave against a rock
To approximate the sound of the coin hitting the sack,
Surreptitiously nudging the bottom of the canvas
To accentuate the deception.
We knew, of course, that it was mere sleight-of-hand
(Indeed, as he grew older and we less credulous,
It was fairly easy to pick up at what point
The small, tarnished piece was actually palmed),
But it was Grandfather, after all, and besides,
The invention was much more pleasant than the reality.

ii.

We were, naturally, prepared to die;
Indeed, if you wear a belt of explosives,
You prefer not to consider other outcomes.
It did not come to pass; there are, sadly, always spies,
Provocateurs who prefer pennies over principles,
And so I have come to this fortress to await my pas de deux
With the roughness of the rope and the kick of the lever.

But there shall be no death.

No death? they shall say, Surely the gravity of your plight,
The strain of isolation has caused you to take leave of your senses,
But I am as clear and constant
As the bells in the guard tower
Which toll on the quarter hour.

Ah, but here is the judge,
Great eyebrows knit, jaw tight,
Reading, measured in tone and pace, from the paper
Which outlines the finality of your sentence,
And I say it is no more than mere parchment,
His words the empty fulminations
Of an unconnected party.

But see here, Musechka, they will insinuate slyly,
What of this image--the eyes bulging,
The face distorted and blue, the tongue blackened,
And I respond that such a depiction,
Along with all prior inquiries and protests,
Are from without and, as such,
No concern of mine.

iii.

When, come sunup the day after tomorrow,
It is time for the law and justice
To finish going through the requisite motions,
I shall walk to the platform
Burdened with neither regret
Nor any notion of dying well
(Such thoughts are for priests, foppish cavalry officers)
And the soldiers that cut me down
Shall, I am sure, will be somewhat irritated with me
For they shall have seen I have, in a sense,
Engineered my own exit,
And that it was a trick
Which they played no part in contriving.

I will admit that “caterwauling” is an ugly word,
But, no matter how joyful the noise,
It’s the only word which fits any sound
That ****** deafening come sunrise on a Sunday morning.
Once again, in song and speech, they were down there,
Loud enough to call all the souls of the just to Glory;
Indeed, the whooping and hollering
Was enough to lead one to suspect
That, just perhaps, they had followed the exhortations of the pastor
And thrown all the wild women, cards and drink
Into the river after all.
It’s not like they do this every **** weekend or anything,
I grumbled (loudly enough to ensure your transition
From the limbo of semi-awake to the real thing,
Part and parcel of ‘til death do we part, in my way of thinking)
But you simply wrapped an arm
A little more tightly around my waist,
Sighing Each to his own, Baby.
Can’t you just celebrate the joys of sleeping in?
I smiled to myself (my back to you, after all)
Ruminating a bit upon the business of revelation
Being a damnably funny thing,
Though I grumped and growled a bit as a matter of principle
How the good book made it a point to mention
That He was not averse to an occasional day off.

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

He'd actually made it up into the tree stand
Two, maybe three years ago now
(Though finding the **** thing
Had been an adventure its ownself,
Finally seeing a bit of chair
Poking through a barricade of lounge chairs and potting soil)
Though not without more than a bit of trepidation and profanity,
(The climber stand heavier and bulkier than he remembered,
His hips and left knee as little less dexterous)
Eventually settling himself into the seat
To wait and ponder and try to balance the coffee intake
To stay in the interval between enough to warm
But not enough to have to **** like a **** racehorse.
He wasn't sure how much time had passed
When the buck came:  six points, and he reckoned
It would dress out close to two hundred pounds
And slowly, cautiously he sighted him
(It was at least a fair look--a shade inside ninety yards,
But some brush and branches keeping it
From being a clean **** shot)
Exhaling and stilling himself
But, inexplicably he would often tell himself later,
He did not fire, and perhaps it was because
He'd have to aim high due to the branches,
And he didn't want to risk simply winging him
Or, even worse, hitting him just solid enough
That he'd wander deeper into the woods to die
(Tracking him not something beyond his experience,
But an unwanted test of other faculties)
And maybe it was something else altogether,
But he'd pulled back and dropped the barrel.
Well son, he mused to himself
Looks like you drew a lucky ticket today.
He stayed in the tree for a little while longer
Until the coffee, long since past any pretense of warmth,
Gave out, and then he clambered down
(The process not any easier and that direction, he'd reckoned)
Hauling himself and acoutrements back to the truck,
The stand carefully placed back where he'd found it,
And as he headed back to the house
He hummed some indeterminate, vaguely hymnal tune
In testimony to the vagaries of time and venison jerky.

He’d never met the old man, of course,
As he’d put haylofts and horseshit behind him
Faster than a body could say “Jack Robinson”,
Though he’d met the son when he’d come through
For a quick hello-and-how’m-I-doing back in sixty-five or sixty-six
(I’d asked him, he’d often say while sharing a laugh with himself,
If the ‘A’ in Nelson A. stood for ’A ******* heap of money.')
No one from that branch of the family comes around anymore,
(It being unlikely they could find the place on a map,
Even one of the few which nodded toward its existence)
Having long since given up on the land in general
And, most certainly, this piece in particular,
Though he carriers the banner for the patronymic
In the ancestral family environs
(The surname, once universally known and,
Depending on one’s outlook,
Revered or reviled, now an anachronistic footnote,
Consigned to a black-and-white era
Like so many I Love Lucy re-runs)
Living in the front rooms of what passes for a house on Bowery Lane,
And he will, all too close to invariably for those old-timers
Who gather at the compact little diner at the four corners
(Its life blood dependent on parents dropping off their progeny
At the tony schools over in Ithaca, the regulars passing the time
In mock argument over which one of them
Actually owns the BMW with Connecticut plates)
All but cackle Boys, I’d gladly pick up the tab today,
But the lawyers are still hagglin’ over my part of the inheritance,
And once he has finished the final refill of coffee,
He slowly negotiates his way out of his chair and heads out,
The gravelly shoulder of the highway all too noticeable
Through the thinning soles of his secondhand boots.

It was one of those places which,
We were instructed with stern tones
And the occasional smack to the ****,
That we were not to go,
A place of childhood sing-song
(River man, river man
He’ll sink his teeth right in your can)
And, later, of clandestine beers and smokes,
Or furtive encounters
With steady sweethearts and short-term solutions.
He’d set up something akin to a lean-to
Hard by a reasonably well-sheltered bank,
One wall of rocky dirt, the other comprised of lumber
Which had been abandoned or purloined or somewhere in between,
And if you resided in that narrow niche
Where you were too old to be scared shitless of him,
And too young to dismiss him out of hand,
He was of a mind to accept a bit of company,
Possibly share a bit of somewhat-warm, store-brand soup,
Even a bit of coffee, if you’d developed the taste for it.
He’d been in the merchant marine, or so he claimed,
Driven there by the search for some constancy
He’d never been privy to in a land-locked world,
Figuring the ceaseless expanse of the ocean
And the regularity of shipboard routine the vessel to all that.
He’d been deeply disappointed, of course,
The waters a kaleidoscopic maelstrom of blues, grays, and purples,
Alternately hammock-smooth and Gothic furious,
All in nothing even mildly evocative of the regularity of the seasons,
And so, he intimated, he’d jumped ship in some unglamorous port,
Living on the run (though for how long was an open question,
And the whos and whys of his prospective captors
Not a subject that he nor his listeners were of a mind to broach)
But he’d never quite been able to shake the lure of the water,
And so he’d set up housekeeping by this particular stream,
Convinced the current held some epiphany, some augury
Which occasional suggested but never truly spoke to him
(Can’t trust the water, and can’t trust the land,
And that hain’t left me much ‘n terms of other options,
He was wont to cackle twice or thrice an hour.)
One day, before some of us were of a mind to see him leave,
He was gone, leaving no trace behind,
Perhaps run off by some officious sheriff’s deputy,
Perhaps by his own leave, searching for some river bed
Which spoke more sweetly, more distinctly,
Or perhaps he came to believe there was a third dwelling option
Somewhere on the banks of the jet stream its ownself.

There was another brother whom history forgets
And though born a fisherman, he preferred other nets.
The coterie of rink rats who lived on the Left Coast
Thought he was sine qua non, and they would often boast
He’s better than his brother Joe,
Es-ki-mo Di-mag-gi-o.

His slapper had heat to make a goalie wet himself;
His wrister was money either five-hole or top-shelf.
After the goaltender felt another puck **** by,
He’d curse and bang the crossbar as fans took up the cry
He’s better than his brother Joe,
Es-ki-mo Di-mag-gi-o.

He dominated rinks out West like no other man
From Calgary to Saskatoon, Fresno to Spokane.
He’d hat tricks in Winnipeg, six-point games in Moose Jaw
Moving scribes to hackneyed verse written in fits of awe.
He’s better than his brother Joe,
Es-ki-mo Di-mag-gi-o.

Though the man was a fine skater, strong, agile and fleet
The slightest flaw in the ice caused anguish to his feet
And he would scold arena crews—What’d you call this mush?
‘Tis nothing but chips and ruts; I’d rather skate on slush!
(More prickly than his brother Joe,
Es-ki-mo Di-mag-gio.)

After one match in Oakland on ice unduly rough
He stormed into the locker room, shouting ‘Nuff’s enough!
He didn’t change his sweater as he stormed out the door,
Hopping on a trolley car, to be seen never more
(He’s a bit loony, don’t you know.
Es-ki-mo Di-mag-gi-o.)

He was sighted in the Yukon, once or perhaps twice
Engaged in some mad mission to find the perfect ice.
Neither man nor beast can say what became of this fool,
Though bits of skate lace appear in petrified bear stool
(Tastes better than his brother Joe?
Es-ki-mo Di-mag-gi-o.)

I am the Lorax, who once spoke for the trees
In the hope of bringing progress to its knees
But now I have grown somewhat older and tired,
My outlook and thought process being rewired
(Sometimes to see forest, you must clear the trees.)

Examine the case of the Brown Bar-ba-loots
Whose interests for so long I worked in cahoots.
Could such timid beasts truly thrive in the wild
So innocent, trusting, submissive, and mild?
(My former assertions I strongly refute.)

Why, see how they frolic and scamper in zoos;
How can one watch them and steadfastly refuse
To see how much better their lot is today
As joy for our children as opposed to prey
(A happy condition where no one can lose.)

Ah, scoff the nihilists, but Truffula Trees,
Those havens for birds and those homes for the bees.
Why, what do you say now that they are all gone,
Removed to make way for some suburban lawn?
(These angry young men—O Lord, take them all please!)

I gently remind them it’s just nature’s way,
That some species go while other ones stay,
The carrier pigeon’s no longer alive
Yet somehow we manage to live—indeed, thrive!
(In the face of brute logic, they’ve little to say.)

So don’t be dismayed or frightened or leery
Of doomsday projections outlined by theory
Suggesting that our time on this earth may be done;
Consider the caged Bar-ba-loot having fun
(And we hear fish do quite well in Lake Erie.)

Don’t give me some dark, inscrutable muse
With faux chaste coyness and misleading smiles;
Give me a memory that I can use
To carry me through the endless gray miles
Of venal ensigns on a windswept deck,
Days sighed away under monochrome skies.
I’ll recall a broad (and she’ll let you check)
With the fleet’s emblem tattooed on both thighs,
A bawd who can take a beer and a shot,
Who’ll let you wear the dress, if you prefer.
She’ll let you have even if you have not;
God bless those sailors who sail in her.
Who needs some girl who’s all cashmere and class?
Give me the **** you can grab by the ***.

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

(for Thom Hickey)

It is, one supposes, a business establishment, if just barely
Though more than one would-be shopper,
Having been squeezed against some ancient china cabinet
Or banging an unsuspecting knee
Against some camouflaged table leg,
Has opined that it as if four walls and a low-slung ceiling
Had suddenly thrown themselves about a yard sale,
In any case the place being filled with such things
Which are, if by no means useless bric-a-brac,
Rendered unremarkable, even somewhat undesirable
By their very familiarity,
And in the midst of this rabbit warren of commerce
(Holding an ancient clarinet in his left hand,
Wand-like, a bemused Prospero considering its pros and cons)
Is the proprietor of the shop,
And he notes that you have stopped
In front of some sixties flying-saucer-***-willow-tree lamp,
And he says Ah, well let me tell you something about that,
Holding forth on its manufacturer,
The curious backstory of its design,
And how he came in possession of several other pieces
At the same time, and of course they have their own tales as well,
And you can't help how this confusion of things of former lives
Has suddenly taken on a certain light, a glow even,
The illumination of shared memory,
The recollection of why such things hold a place
In our pasts and presents, and after you exit
You give in to the musing that there were some items
You did not give due consideration,
Which may necessitate a return trip.

He’d never read him, understand,
At least not that he’d remembered;
Might have half-skimmed something in Look or Esquire,
But he certainly wasn’t much for novels,
And there were kids to raise to rise, a war to fight
(His platoon had been pinned down at Anzio,
Leaving him precious little time for dispatches from the front,
Save  for a  singular postcard
He’d bought in Netunno on a rainy April afternoon,
On which he’d scratched Babe, I’m still alive and kickin’,
Worth ten thousand words
To a harried, frightened seventeen-year-old,
With one in the cradle and one on the way),
But then all that was later on, or earlier
Depending on where you stood,
Time being a lazy, molasses-unhurried thing to him now,
Like the leisurely old Owasco Inlet which ran through town,
Seeming to go in no direction in particular,
Running north or south as it deemed fit at the moment.
Once, he’d worked at the typewriter plant on Spring Street,
Fashioning hammers and slugs for Standards and Silents
And, later on, the electric Coronets and Model 250s
Until he packed it in with forty-five years under his belt,
Though all that pretty much the stuff of memory as well:
The factory gone a couple years now,
Rubble carted away, leaving an angry brown patch of land,
The last generation who’d worked the plant
Having up and left, by and large,
In most cases taking his generation with it as well
(Factories tending to be family affairs,
So many of his contemporaries unwilling to be so distant
From children and grandchildren,
Such notions being unknown in company towns)
Leaving the place a touch foreign,
A bit alien to folks who stayed on,
Men without a country as it were, doing their level best
To navigate waters without landmarks, without buoys,
Trying to reach harbors of questionable refuge.

My regiment?  The New York 156th, B Company.
I’d left the farm in the hands of my wife and her uncle
(Polly and I never had children,
Something I’m grateful for now.)
We’d boarded the train in Kingston,
Figuring we’d have a picnic, see the countryside
Fire a few shots at the Rebels and the odd squirrel
And be home before snowfall.
The picnic was spoiled **** quickly, and not by ants;
We took fire within a half-day of meeting up
With the main body of the corps,
And couldn’t get our heads back up until **** near Appomattox.

Truth told, I don’t remember exactly how many men I killed
(And in some cases, “men” stretches  the truth,
As some of them looked like altar boys from the church,
Same age as the sons I’d never had.)
You find after a while it’s best to lose count,
Do what you can to forget faces
(Now that the beds are soft and the fields are quiet,
The faces come back to disturb my nights then and again.)
Fact is, I’m convinced I survived only because I rode down
What was human about me, or at least the good part;
Best to be like cows or some poor **** stupid ox:
Eat what you can where you can,
Sleep when you might have the option,
And, like the other poor dumb bovine *******
Simply waiting for the cudgel,
Don’t let your thoughts stray elsewhere
Until you’re more kin with the animals than anything else
(I remember Tommy Dunbar from over Esopus way
Brought his dog with him;
It marched with us all the way to Pleasant Hill,
And the only time I cried between enlisting and mustering out
Was when that mongrel snuffed it.)
Anyways, that is all over, and good riddance to it;
I’ve no desire to mount up
With the Grand Army of the Republic types
And go wave the ****** shirt in some convention hall in Albany,
Nor am I inclined to meet up with fellow graybeards
From the other side of the line to sleep in tents
And mock-shoot wooden rifles and imaginary minie *****.
It’s over, and I prefer to keep it that way.
Funny thing, the colonels and chaplains always insisted
That God was on our side, and I suspect their boys did the same.
I suspect (though I’d never tell preacher, of course)
That He left the field quite early in the proceedings.

There is always the fire,
Whether in the charcoal sketches
Or the scattered canvases, each shunted off to the side
In various states of incompletion
(He offered little clue as to why each was seemingly abandoned,
As he seemed reasonably content with them
In terms of composition and technique,
Suggesting there was something else that eluded him,
Something he had misapprehended)
An all-encompassing conflagration
Which promised the eventual envelopment
Of all in its path, flesh and façade,
Mortar and muscle,
Yet the assemblage of waiters, telephone operators,
Delivery boys and meter maids
Do not, by and large, exhibit the expected terror;
Oh, it is there now and again,
Mixed in among those who would,
With a certain madness in their gaze,
Exhort the torch-bearers onward,
And there is the odd face who regard the whole undertaking
With an unmistakable glee,
But, by and large, there is a matter-of-factness about the figures,
Varying between grim determination and an utter sang-froid,
And when one of the select few he has showed the preliminaries
Noted how he'd expected the dried brush and ground cover
To burst into flame on a more-or-less daily basis,
He looked up from his pencils and grunted
When it comes, the brush won't have a ******* thing
To do with it.

Its color sat somewhere on the spectrum between brown and gray
(Such things being dependent on vagaries of the light,
And the perspective of the beholder)
And it served as a testament
To the muted benefits of near adequacy,
Being too thin for the portentous winds of December,
And too warm for the capricious sunshine of May,
Its threadbare functionality emblematic of its owner,
Whose relationship with those around him
(Indeed mankind and his universe in general)
Vacillated between an affronted indifference
And an implacable if somewhat muted contempt,
His commerce with his fellow man,
Excepting that required to provide him
With the basics of sustenance and shelter,
Carried on in an epistolary fashion,
Through letters he wrote,
Sometimes to those he encountered on a daily basis,
More often to mankind and the unheeding cosmos in general,
Which were stuffed higgledy-piggledy into his coat pockets.
These missives were not humdrum laundry lists
Of those slights and injuries, be they petty or mortal,
But rather soaring and high-flown in nature and tone,
More kin of the sermon than the scolding,
Celebrations of life’s splendors great and small,
More often than not those he knew little or nothing of first-hand.
He’d no intention of sharing these dispatches
With the world at large or anyone in particular;
He’d simply empty his pockets once they were full enough
To present an inconvenience,
And he’d laundered any number of them
On more than one occasion,
And when he’d passed behind this earthly veil,
All but unnoticed and unmourned,
His landlady had simply emptied the contents of the coat's pockets
And consigned them to the trash,
Believing the garment barely fit for charitable purposes
Washed and given a goodly airing out,
Let alone burdened with the detritus of another man’s life.

The classically-trained and symphony-polished,
If someone deigned to listen to their disapprobations,
Would tell all and sundry that he was playing it all wrong;
Indeed, his technique so unsound, his ******* so maladroit
That those who had wrestled with that stringed contraption
Reportedly favored by the angels
For years, indeed decades, at Julliard and Oberlin
Insisted that he couldn’t really play at all
(His opinion of his critics remained unquoted,
Though it was said he tuned his instrument
In such a fashion to ensure that he alone
Could produce notes from it)
Yet every night, in the middle of another knockabout farce,
He would sit alone, under a single light, and pluck away
While the gathering in the seven-fifty tickets sat rapt,
Commutes from Chappaqua and mortgages in Great Neck
Forgotten for the *****, wholly transported out of themselves
By the shabby- hatted and unruly-mopped figure before them,
Even the cognoscenti and conservatory-bred
Bewitched in spite of themselves,
Though they regarded the strumming
Much differently than the great unwashed in the stalls
(The author of these anomalous tones, being a reticent sort,
Keeping his opinion of them to himself.)

(In which there is a boy, a man, and a curious box.)

I can’t imagine what the muzhiks would have thought of this.
They’d probably have me burned
The boy is not listening to the man;
He is, in a mixture of fear, wonder,
And no small measure of puzzlement,
Utterly transfixed by the box
Which sits between him and the man,
Who is fluttering his hands in some pantomime of supplication
Nearly yet never quite touching the strange box
Which sprouts two pieces of wire,
One pointing straight up toward God,
The other looped like a noose.
The man manipulates his fingers in delicate movements,
As if he was playing a pianissimo movement on a piano
Whose keyboard is embedded somewhere in the very air itself,
But the sounds… vaguely familiar, to be sure:
He hears the barking of a small dog, perhaps,
Or something much like the faraway crow of a rooster
Filtered through the half-tones of the last moments of a dream,
Yet not quite of this world or this life,
And, unconsciously, for his mother is of the old peasant stock,
The boy crosses himself, and hears himself say
In a voice not quite his own,
That surely it requires a miracle or some sort of magic
To make such a wonder as this machine.
The man stops his gesturing for a moment to look at the boy,
And then he bursts out laughing.
I didn’t figure out how it works so I could build this;
I built it so I could figure out how it works.

There was, every spring, a new batch of pups,
Yipping, nipping, clumsy ***** of ***** fur,
Looking for all the world like speckled tennis *****
Before they’d learned any hard lessons
At the hands of a racquet.
They chased their tails and each other,
Not to mention various other denizens of the barnyard:
Frantic chicks, cranky piglets,
The occasional bemused draft horse,
And sometimes they chased us as well,
Yelping childishly, rolling with us on the ground,
Nipping bare fingers and toes,
Afterwards lying on the ground asleep,
Looking , save for the rhythmic twitching of their paws,
Positively angelic.

Come late August,
The time would come to set them on the *****.
We’d long since stopped thinking about it,
Much less questioning it
(I had, one year, asked my father if the puppies had to go
One time too many until,
With a look that brooked no further conversation,
He said flatly It’s what they’re born to.)
So we went on with the business
Of the soft, slow late summer
Until one evening just after sunset
We would hear the baying of the hounds
Out toward the back fields,
Mechanical and workmanlike at first,
But soon strained and syncopated with excitement,
And at some point there would be
A cacophony of cries and snarls
Until such time there was only silence.
The next morning we would visit the dogs,
And we’d pet them and rough-house a bit,
And there might be an oddly rouged spot
On their coats here and there,
Or one of them might sneeze out a tuft of fur
That didn’t rightly belong to them,
And every year our Uncle Bryce would slyly opine
You boys may want to be a bit more careful
Around their mouths now, hear?

(POSTSCRIPT TO AUTHOR'S NOTE:  As the bit of my brain which allows me to actually complete a piece of writing seems to have gone on hiatus, this chestnut is re-submitted for your approval)


We’d stumbled upon it simply by chance,
Playing on a channel heretofore unknown to us,
Almost as if the remote, in a final, desperate attempt
To escape the CGI-augmented Britneys and Biebers,
Had taken matters into its own hands and steered us there
(Indeed, when we tried to find that channel later,
It had gone a-gleaming, replaced by some lower-case Telemundo)
Presenting no outsized and over-decibeled spectacle
But a stark, quiet, indeed all but silent black-and-white panorama
Where a distinctly un-scrubbed and un-homogenized Santa
Delivers no new cars, no cartoon-mouse vacation cavalcade,
No million dollar prize from some scripted faux-survival experience,
But those things from the realm of the small, the subtle:
A sweater, a meal, a bottle for those not overwhelmed by the contents,
All courtesy of a purveyor of gifts seeking nothing more
Than to provide some measure of comfort and joy
For those who were well short on either.
It all tends toward the romantic and maudlin a bit,
One could contend
(And, indeed, did not the teleplay’s progenitor
Insist on spending his eternity on a lonely hilltop,
In order that he could have an unobstructed view
Of the cold, narrow lake
For which he’d formed such an improbable and irrational fondness?)
And those who take such a position may very well be right,
But it is equally likely that we could be better men in a better place
If the notion that we could rise above
Our tin-can and yowling-tabby tribulations
And embrace that within ourselves which is child-like and yet saintly
Was submitted for our consideration on more than an annual basis.


(AUTHOR'S NOTE: This poem owes a considerable debt to the December 23, 1960 episode of The Twilght Zone.  The episode, entitled "The Night of the Meek", features Art Carney as a decidedly down-on-his-luck department store Santa who receives a helping hand courtesy of Messrs. Serling and Claus.)

We’d stumbled upon it simply by chance,
Playing on a channel heretofore unknown to us,
Almost as if the remote, in a final, desperate attempt
To escape the CGI-augmented Britneys and Biebers,
Had taken matters into its own hands and steered us there
(Indeed, when we tried to find that channel later,
It had gone a-gleaming, replaced by some lower-case Telemundo)
Presenting no outsized and over-decibeled spectacle
But a stark, quiet, indeed all but silent black-and-white panorama
Where a distinctly un-scrubbed and un-homogenized Santa
Delivers no new cars, no cartoon-mouse vacation cavalcade,
No million dollar prize from some scripted faux-survival experience,
But those things from the realm of the small, the subtle:
A sweater, a meal, a bottle for those not overwhelmed by the contents,
All courtesy of a purveyor of gifts seeking nothing more
Than to provide some measure of comfort and joy
For those who were well short on either.
It all tends toward the romantic and maudlin a bit,
One could contend
(And, indeed, did not the teleplay’s progenitor
Insist on spending his eternity on a lonely hilltop,
In order that he could have an unobstructed view
Of the cold, narrow lake
For which he’d formed such an improbable and irrational fondness?)
And those who take such a position may very well be right,
But it is equally likely that we could be better men in a better place
If the notion that we could rise above
Our tin-can and yowling-tabby tribulations
And embrace that within ourselves which is child-like and yet saintly
Was submitted for our consideration on more than an annual basis.

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

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

Perhaps it was her voice itself, clear and simple,
Unalloyed by any classically trained fol-de-rol,
Or possibly the nature of her faith
Displayed with such clarity, such transparency
By that very instrument,
But in any case, she had utterly bewitched the populace
Of the place known as Ahwaga by her distant cousins,
And when she stood on the Delaware & Hudson platform
The next morning, they had cheered her lustily,
All but begging her You must return to us,
But the train had lost its footing on a sharp grade
Mere hundreds of yards before making the station at Deposit,
And she was lost in the carnage and conflagration.
The townspeople she had said her farewells to that morning
Were distraught, their feelings a mix of grief
And an odd sense of culpability, a nagging misgiving
That perhaps this was an omen, some augury
Denoting that their own faith was not up to scratch,
And so they had taken her back to their own burgh
To bury her in a manner befitting her piety
(She had been travelling with siblings,
But they acquiesced to the plan, though how willingly
Not wholly apparent at the time,
And made no clearer through the ramble of time)
And so she was laid to rest in a plot
Surrounded by ornate fencing, her grave marked
By an obelisk pointing unambiguously to her Heaven,
And it is said that, on autumn evenings
When the breeze rustle the dying leaves just so,
You can hear the spirits of her Mohawk brethren
Come down from Quebec, murmuring songs
Telling of the spirits living in the trees and hedgerows,
Spoken in the ancient tongue
Of the languid, unhurried Susquehanna far below.

The historical marker, doubtless wearily press-stamped
By some inmate at Attica or Dannemora,
Refers to the relic as St. Leger’s Tower,
Though those old-timers who have not died off or fled south
Prefer the name “Barry’s Folly”,
As the general in quesiton was reported to have claimed
That it would stand, like Empire itself,
***** and unsullied for a dozen centuries,
Indeed several hundred years beyond as well.
All that lingers now is the main of its foundation,
Topped with no more than an uneven row or two of brick,
Sitting squat and forlorn like some drowsy and unconcerned sentry
Standing guard for the nearby entrance
To an old, long since abandoned cemetery
Where the stones of the war dead and early settlers
Have been washed clean of names, dates, and epitaphs
By the tainted, corrosive rains
Which once rolled in from Gary, Flint and Hamtramck,
And further up the hill, a weathered and peeling billboard
Invites those unwitting travelers who have wandered off the Thruway
To experience the magic of Herkimer Diamonds.

He'd lived in the remaining house on the little byway,
The place and its existence somewhat accidental
As it was built as the groundskeeper's cottage
Accompanying a rambling edifice
Built by a former president of the mill,
That once-grand structure gone to rack and ruin
Nothing remaining save the odd bit of foundation
Poking forlornly above crownvetch and milkweed,
Though the lot of the man we'd dubbed the ogre
(The notion that he had an actual name
Not occurring to us at the time,
Though, as Nicky Demmer wisely noted
Whatever it might be, it must be unspoken.)
Was only slightly less unkempt and foreboding,
And it is hard to remember what exactly made him
Something to be feared and avoided at all costs,
Perhaps the combination of height
(Though lessened yet somehow accentuated
By a slight yet perceptible stoop)
And a widow's peak at the top of an unusually high forehead
Bookended by wiry and unruly locks,
Perhaps the fact that he rarely appeared in the daylight,
And then squinting as he turned his head to the sky
In the manner of one who fully expected
That it would fall, Chicken-Little style
But in any case his lawn
Was strictly no-man's land,
And any wiffle ball or frisbee,
Regardless of how new it may be
Or the retribution attached to coming home without it,
Remained behind, mourned but forsaken
And at some point we moved beyond our unease,
Too old for such superstition,
Moving on to other totems, other portents
Though some years later I happened upon his obituary,
Laying out the signposts of an ordinary
Though vaguely underwhelming and melancholy life:
He'd worked on the third shift at the mill all his days,
Thus precluding much of the social commerce
With his fellow man, no Rotary or Odd Fellows rites
To be performed at his service
(Of which there was none, burial being private as well)
And the list of survivors was limited to one daughter
Wholly unknown to us, ostensibly taken elsewhere
By an unmentioned and unmourning mother.
The item, brief and unadorned as it was,
Brought me back to that fretful nine-year-old self,
Though imbued with a greater disquiet,
As I had a deeper knowledge of the finality
Of cold, agate type, among several other things.

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

They rarely bother to mow here anymore,
Once a month, perhaps every other
(Times are tight, full burials being pretty much
A thing of the past these days)
Though it’s unlikely anyone would notice
If the grass grew a bit longish,
Or the crownvetch and crabgrass became a little more prevalent,
No one being buried in this part of the cemetery
For the better part of a hundred years now,
The stones bleached and faded from decades of sleet and sunlight
And acid rain from the auto plants of Flint and Lorain and South Bend,
(Now boneyards for gears and drill bits themselves)
Those names still legible on the teetering, unsteady stones
Mostly the stolid Scotch-Irish surnames
Vaguely familiar from the town’s founding generation
Found on its street signs or pocket-parks,
Their descendants mostly having fled to friendlier climes,
Though the odd lesser strain of the families remain
(Not that they would choose to pay tribute to those ancestors
To whom they have fared so poorly in comparison)
Though many more bear the family names of their trades,
Clusters of Coopers, Weavers, and Smiths,
Their stones bearing the sentiments of grim Victorian fatalism,
Thus in mercy early call’d away or The happy soul is that which fled.
Such thoughts are quaint, eccentric things to us now,
As would be the clothes they wore, the songs they sung,
But we would know them nonetheless,
Know the muted joy of their minor successes,
The depth and finality of their defeats,
The sting of bowing and scraping
To the owners of the mill, the haughty town fathers,
As they served them at the milliners or the drug store,
Their odd, fleeting dreams of grandeur having come to rest here,
Cherry-lidded as they proceed to dust.

Not much happens in these parts, he would demur,
As if he’d be asked in the first place,
He one of the dwindling few remaining in this dwindling town.
Nevertheless, he has seen his share in four score and change years
From the vantage point of his place
Which sits just off the corner of the Penoyer Road:
Boom times and bust,
Snowdrifts threatening to lick the roof lines of houses,
Boys running through the embers of fallen leaves,
Shirtless and barefoot on improbably warm October days,
Young men in hay wagons and rattle-*** Chevy pickups
Laughing and singing, confident and carefree,
Making their way to the old train depot down at Apulia Station
First step on their way to show the jerries or the VC
Exactly how Upstate farm boys took care of business,
Windows adorned by placards with a gold star
Illuminated by a solitary light bulb at odd hours.
Here and there, younger types have begun to dot the landscape:
Professors with a romantic hankering to get back to the land,
Neo-hippies with their own reasons for embracing the rural life,
Each in their tune walking about their yards
Holding keyboarded and wi-fied replicas
Of that which Moses carried down the mountain,
Their fixer-uppers or double-wides adorned with small dishes
Pointed forlornly at the horizon in search of some satellite supplication.
While he has seen enough not to be too ******* sure about things,
He suspects that complexity and contentment
Rarely walk hand-in-hand,
So he keeps his needs simple enough
To be met by the ancient radio
(Huge, wood-cabineted shambling thing,
More attuned for Amos and Andy than All Things Considered)
The three-checkout grocery in Tully,
The Morton-building sheltered family practice over in Cazenovia
(The squalid, sooty skyline of Syracuse,
Split by six lanes of high-octane madness,
As remote and slightly terrifying to him as Mars itself)
As he has learned enough from thickets of trees
Which all but shriek with torrents of crows in September dusks,
The subtle changes of stream banks
Tinged by the stubbornness of frost on early May mornings
Or blanketed by the pig-iron forge heat of July afternoons,
To know that there are sufficient and possibly necessary limits
To the places where two legs or four wheels can carry a body.

We try to stick to canned goods these days.
Not that it’s particularly easy, mind you,
As the expiry dates have come and gone;
You have to have a feel for what ages well
And what simply can’t be trusted.
Some of the stuff in jars is OK, if the seal’s good
And it hasn’t had too much unnaturally bright light or heat.
Sometimes, in frustration or fear or just plain madness,
We’ll grab a couple of pieces of fruit or berries
Straight from a tree or bush
(Just a brief, guilty nibble, mind you,
As our wiring for self-preservation quickly takes over,
Though that’s akin to insanity in itself;
Indeed, a considerable number of people
Won’t even consider stepping outside anymore.)

We have come to this place, then,
Carrying our threadbare blankets,
Our dented and dinged peas and garbonzos
To this portentously lush locale
(Nature’s metamorphosis, now running in overdrive,
Having its winners among its throng of losers,
Sitting among a recklessness of flowers
Which have smartened themselves up
In sizes and hues heretofore unknown)
As what passes for evening takes hold
(The daytime air so stultifying and adulterated
They don’t even bother issuing warnings and advisories any more.)
We watch the odd, unsettling out-of-place aurorae,
Not giving utterance to the obvious—is this the one?—
But choosing to soft-shoe our way through the hours
With small talk, the odd kiss and cuddle
(There are those who have taken the humanity of affection
Beyond the merely foolhardy or oblivious,
Cults of propagation comprised of odd Gnostic outliers,
Dreamy and staunch proponents of extraterrestrial rescuers.)
As the darkness takes hold, we lift our faces to the stars
(For the nights are always starry,
Clouds being relegated to only memory)
And as they sit above us, stark, awesome in the oldest sense,
It is hard not to think of what an ancient man
Wrote of one equally ancient to him,
That though they have seen the totality of our folly,
They remain wholly without fault.

Oh, there is light in such places:
The galleries of Soho, the catwalks of Milan,
The boardwalks of Blackpool,
But it exists to flatter, to obfuscate, to tell alluring lies,
A trompe l’oeil of a family picnic
Etched on the wall of an abandoned orphanage,
The siren song crooned by a spider
To the enraptured and wholly credulous fly.

Ah, but the illumination here!
The sun reflecting off the roofs
On those Bob Evans and Shoney’s you would shun,
The starlight backed by a host of owls, a symphony of crickets,
All serving to peel away the layers of artifice and cunning,
To be shucked away like so many cornhusks,
Allowing the secrets of the universe to be whispered to you,
Faintly yet unmistakably, and once moved by these epiphanies
What is to stop you from running along the narrow, unlined streets
And green open spaces in mad, unfashionable celebration,
Exempt from the clucking of the chic and the congnoscenti?

It had, so he recalled, no pretensions of being something
So grand as a lake;
Just a roundish body of water, not particularly suited for diving
Nor of any real attraction to a fisherman,
Nothing there save the odd chub or sunfish to languidly pull one’s line,
Its recreational attributes limited to a postage-stamp size patch of sand
And one solitary rope attached to an equally lonely old truck tire,
Neither being of guaranteed fitness for the task at hand.
He’d gone there for one reason, and one reason only;
There’d been a girl, one late spring and a subsequent early fall,
And at times they’d gone there on the occasional sunny day,
Traversing a twisting two-lane stretch of county road
(The blacktop sprinkled with North Country sandstone,
Giving it the pinkish hue of a rainbow trout
Angrily flopping about on a dock)
In order to get waist-deep in the water for a few minutes
(The pond never really warm enough
To swim in with malice aforethought)
Before settling on blankets to drink cokes
And eat the sandwiches they’d picked up
At the ancient, Mayberry-esque general store just west of town
And to speak in hesitant and uncomfortable half-sentences
Concerning accidents of birth and death, speculative half-made plans.

In the end, it all went no further than talk,
At least after the inevitable transition
From the fleeting, furtive evenings
To the harsh, unremitting light of day.
In truth, he’d always had one eye fixed beyond the horizon,
Beyond the lumbering, lumpy old Adirondack foothills,
Alternately comforting and claustrophobic,
All the time paying heed
To some some whisper, nagging and ethereal,
That all this was simply some momentary way station on the path
To something finer, something substantive, some end of the road;
He’d no way of knowing that the murmur would remain,
Soft yet persistent, long after he’d left that cold cow country,
Rumbling on as the calendar proceeded and the hairline receded.

His work, as it happened, sometimes carried him
To the stark, sparsely populated environs
Situated to the north of the Thruway,
And he would, almost in spite of himself, concoct some excuse
To take himself back out by the old pond,
Still unprepossessing, the same tree sporting the rope-and-tire swing
(Some descendant of the one he had known,
But in the same uneasy state of disrepair),
And, now and then, he’d pull off onto the shoulder,
Leaving the car to walk down by the water’s edge.
On one occasion, he’d had the mad impulse
To dive into the water head-first and fully immerse himself,
And had gone as far as to take off his shirt and tie.
He’d checked himself in the end, of course;
There were any number of water-borne nasties
Courtesy of beavers and Canada geese, most likely leeches as well.
He’d dressed himself, and headed back to the car,
Making a note to himself to remember the hair-pin curve
Just this side of Hannawa Falls, gruesome stretch of road
Which had claimed its share of undergraduates back in his day,
And he’d always thought it sad how many bright futures
Had tumbled over the guardrails and into the ravine
To be held like dark secrets in the underbrush.

The story is in Grimm’s ancient tome
Of the girl who wove straw into gold
Bamboozling the evil, gnarled gnome
With subterfuge both cunning and bold.

Sing songs of cold tea in Styrofoam
And rude brown bread, dry without butter;
She knows no carriage nor castle home
Awaits the princess in the gutter.

The dwarf chose not to concede defeat,
Rightly convinced that a deal’s a deal;
Filings and pleadings finally complete,
The circuit court to hear the appeal.

Sing songs of cold tea in Styrofoam
And rude brown bread, dry without butter;
She knows no carriage nor castle home
Awaits the princess in the gutter.

The panel’s judgment swift and direct;
The lower court had most gravely erred.
Petitioner may rightly expect
Payment plus damages, they concurred.

Sing songs of cold tea in Styrofoam
And rude brown bread, dry without butter;
She knows no carriage nor castle home
Awaits the princess in the gutter.

Bailiff took heir and inheritance,
Leaving nil which could be sold or pawned,
The king’s glances gave full evidence
The scapegoat would be a clever blonde.

Sing songs of cold tea in Styrofoam
And rude brown bread, dry without butter;
She knows no carriage nor castle home
Awaits the princess in the gutter.

There was no chance she could be returned
To her former home life in the woods
The miller’s girl, derided and spurned:
She’s a beauty, yes, but damaged goods.

Sing songs of cold tea in Styrofoam
And rude brown bread, dry without butter;
She knows no carriage nor castle home
Awaits the princess in the gutter.

A room in Amsterdam’s red-light tract
The former princess is on the game.
Still works under an implied contract;
The terms, however, not quite the same.

Sing songs of cold tea in Styrofoam
And rude brown bread, dry without butter;
She knows no carriage nor castle home
Awaits the princess in the gutter.

There exists all manner of confinement: bricks and bars, of course
The reward for having fallen out of favor with some jurist,
Black-robed and clad with a fitting solemnity,
But any number of others as well--all less tangible, less corporeal,
And, as such, all the more insidious.
The most forbidding of all confinements, though,
Are those of our own making,
Or (even more maddening, more exasperating) those of our own being,
The limits of our sight-lines at the horizon,
The boundaries of our own perception,
The tyranny of the senses.

Suffer my folly, then, to put out to sea
In the hope (though I fully understand
If you term it something else altogether) of finding
Some odd grail residing in the interval between dreams and the defined,
Though possessing can achieve nothing more
Than to taint it with the stench of the workaday.
I know that this mad exercise in carpe diem will not likely end well;
My safe returns dependent on instruments and forecasts,
Man-made and consequently fallible.
When such time comes, keen some song of the dead for me
As you wail upon the beach, if you must;
I will have likely achieved some semblance of peace.

It had been, indeed almost constantly so,
Spotted and dotted with the odd bit of graffiti:
Hastily spray-painted citing of some school’s graduating class,
Irregularly shaped hearts bearing initials of couples
Whose undying fealty would not last the summer,
The odd cartoon figure, its subject occasionally discernible
But what had appeared
Upon the old Buffalo-and-Boston railroad bridge
Was a different animal altogether,
Painstakingly crafted brushstrokes
Crossing t’s and gently rounding o’s,
The entire length spanning Route 20
Marked with a simple admonition—Just Love.
The DOT crew, adequately supplied
With power washers and gray paint
And sufficiently featherbedded with summer help,
Sauntered in after the weekend to restore the overpass
To something akin to pristine condition,
But one of the summer kids
(An accounting major from the state school over in Cobleskill,
Probably knew who’d written this in the first place)
Hesitated before pulling the trigger on a sprayer.
Boss, he grumbled, it just don’t feel right blasting this off.
The foreman sighed (his disdain for the temp help
Bordering on downright mania most days)
I feel ya, kid, but the time to love yer fellow man
Is all off the clock.

There’s tale upon tale told
In praise of Washington’s Big Train
And the horsehide deeds of Old Pete
Shall be told often and again.
And honest Matty, the Big Six
Hurl’d more than a gem or two,
But they can’t match The Rainmaker
Tossed by Pittsburgh Dan McGrew.

He’d come by train from Keokuk
As green as a patch of clover;
And though he stood ‘bout six-foot-three
Weighed one-forty or just over.
He sauntered up to the owner
Mister Dreyfus? I’m Dan McGrew,
And I am the damnedest pitcher
That anyone has ever knew.

Old Barney found himself amused
By such a gangly cow-town rube
So the boss man and Freddy Clarke
Thought they’d have some fun with this ****.
There’s Wagner—can you strike him out?
His reply left them in stitches.
I reckon that won’t be too hard;
I should only need three pitches.

Oh, so your fastball is that good?
Skipper Clarke said with a chuckle
Don’t throw one, so Clarke said aghast
Can your curve make Hans’ knees buckle?
He shook his head, Nope, don’t throw that,
As he grinned like a wiseacre.
Got just one pitch, that’s all I need,
And I call it The Rainmaker.

They called the Dutchman to the plate
To knock him back to I-o-way
And he swung early and swung late
But couldn’t put one into play
And Wagner grunted, moaned and screamed
But found he couldn’t hit his stuff;
Whatever this Rainmaker was
It sure was plenty good enough.

He tossed the ball twenty feet high
Just a soft lob with a stiff wrist
And a slight twitch of his fingers
To give it just a little twist
Oh, it might swoop like a falcon
Or drift as softly as a dove
And often it would come down wet
From touching rain clouds up above.

The clubs in the senior circuit
Found themselves flummoxed by this lad:
He no-hit the Bees in Beantown
And drove the Cubs and Redlegs mad.
He hasn’t got enough to hit!
They growled in Brooklyn and Philly,
But his ledger said otherwise;
A gaudy twenty-six and three.

The final day of the season
Found the Buccos and Giants tied,
And no one doubted who would be
Taking the hill for Pittsburgh’s side
For New York, Matty took the hill
And both hurlers were simply great
Not one batter had crossed home plate
As the two clubs completed eight.

The Giants bench hooted at him
That beanpole throws like a girlie!
But he got Doyle to pop up
And then fanned Snodgrass on just three
The next Giant to reach the plate
Was the hard-hitting Red Murray
And John McGraw said Now he’s done,
Red will chase him in a hurry.

But Murray tapped the first pitch foul
And missed the second one outright
The Pittsburgh bench now taunted him
Good morning, good noon and goodnight!
McGrew than tossed one up so high
His catcher swore it clipped a bird
And then Dan strolled right off the mound
As not a soul uttered a word.

The old ballpark is long gone now
And those who toiled the same;
That pitch still lives in infamy
As does the pitcher and the game.
The Bucs have had other heroes
With deeds and feats of great renown
But they still speak of Dan McGrew
And his pitch which never came down.

We’re the salty dogs of mo-der-ni-ty,
Robot starfish programmed so expertly
(And we’d like to state most em-phat-ic-ly
There’s no cannibalism in the Royal Navy.)

As we sail the blue waters virtually,
There’s a thigh for you and a femur for me
(Just a wee little joke, as you can plainly see;
There’s no cannibalism in the Royal Navy.)

We sing along to Yanni and John Tesh
Though we’d prefer to have them in the flesh
(It’s their haunting tunes we find quite tasty;
There’s no cannibalism in the Royal Navy.)

We serve the nation and prove our worth,
Map the sewers of Brixton, gnaw on Colin Firth
(He treads the boards in-spi-ray-shun-ly;
There’s no cannibalism in the Royal Navy.)

When our duty’s done and the day is through
We have a most proper naval bar-be-cue
(Though we replace officers most fre-quent-ly
There’s no cannibalism in the Royal Navy.)