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.

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

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

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

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

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

It is like shaking hands with a bag of oyster crackers;
Joints sprained, ligaments torn, fingers fractured
And splayed off in several different directions
Like a weathervane that has had a rather nasty shock, indeed,
The whorls of his fingertips, the uneven rise and fall of the knuckles
Serving as a travelogue of a lifetime spent
In towns not quite ready for the big time:
Olean, Oneonta, Visalia, Valdosta, a dozen more besides,
A million miles on buses
Of uncertain vintage and roadworthiness.
Each scar and swelling, each uneven path
Between base and fingertip has a tale of its own;
The ring finger on the left hand first broken
By a Big Bob Veale fastball that was supposed to be a curve,
Later snapped again by Steve Dalkowski,
Who, drinking quite a bit by then,
(When ol’ Steve had put away a few, he notes ruefully,
You didn’t want to hit him, catch him,
Or sit in the first few rows behind the plate)
Most likely never saw the sign
Indicating slider instead of high heat.
The index finger on his throwing hand?  
Well, that was from a foul tip in…Wellsville in ’59?  Walla Walla in ’62?
When you’ve bit up by the ball as many times as I have,
You tend to forget what you tore up when.
Ah, but no such problem with the right pinkie;
That was snapped one cold April night
Somewhere between Winnipeg and Duluth,
During a poker game when a backup infielder
Produced an unexpected and wholly inexplicable king
Seemingly from nowhere.

But those hands!  They were, in the lexicon of the scouts
(The same ones who labeled him
With the dreaded tag of “good field, no hit”)
Who trolled the sandlot parks
And high school fields of his childhood, “soft”;
Indeed, he could cradle a ninety-mile-an-hour fastball like an infant,
And, with the gentlest and most imperceptible of movements,
Turn the wildness of a nineteen-year-old phenom
Into an inning-ending third strike, and even now,
Two decades of bad lighting and jury-rigged equipment
Having turned the topography of his digits craggy and asymmetrical,
They seem as smooth and supple as they were at nineteen,
With all the strength and unsullied smoothness of youth,
As he grips and waggles an unseen bat
In the course of retelling
(In his one brief, glorious spring in camp with the big club)
How he doubled to the gap in right-center
Off none other than the great Whitey Ford himself.

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.

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.

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.

The place seems somewhat less imposing,
The healing effects of time a beneficence
Denied to wood, metal, and stone
(The high towers bent or fallen,
The chain-link and barbed-wire of the fences
Rusted, unsuitable, merely vestigial)
But it maintains a force, a malevolence
In spite of a certain dilapidation,
Though its physical condition no more than a passing concern
For those who have returned,
As they have matters of a less corporeal nature
Which necessitates a reappearance at such a place:
Some have come in penance for transgressions,
Be they real or imagined,
Some have come to mourn,
For while there are any number of monuments and museums,
There is a dearth of gravesites.
While some have come simply because they continue to be,
Their very presence, their simple act of survival
The essence of testimony.

That thing of varied tangibility,
Be it the West or the frontier or whatever,
Has long since gone a-gleaming,
The time when it was still proper
To pay ones respects
Having passed beyond memory itself,
Those phenomena so elemental,
So deeply interwoven in our days and fates
They were bestowed monickers of their own
Now simple chemical reactions and natural curiosities
Familiar and easily explicable,
Yet as we apprehend those still, starlit skies
Which engendered such wonder in our forebearers,
Our understanding of the heavens
Has not left us any less lonely or forsaken
Than those sad men on horseback
Who whispered a name plaintively into the zephyr.

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.

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.

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.

If anyone should ask who I was after I have left this place,
You’ll likely come up with the most self-effacing lie
Convenient to you at that particular moment,
For I was perceived to be an accessory to your greatest mortification,
As such, I could never be more than just a what-may-have-been,
A reminder of a lifetime unfulfilled, unrealized.
Your brother was simply a name to me,
A dimly remembered face
Among any number of names and faces;
But you, oh, you were every word I’d ever sung or spoken,
And I knew every subtle rise and dip in the bridge of your nose,
The shoreline of your eyes, every shade of shadow
The sun cast upon your face.
I could not be what your brother imagined or prayed I was,
What, in fact, you are to me, thus ensuring
I would always be, in some sense, in some sunken corner of your mind,
A broken promise to that broken boy,
A sum destined forever to be in arrears.

Death is most charitable when it is final,
Once the defeated remains of the dearly departed
Have been neatly packaged, the papers filed,
The period placed on the end of the sentence,
For too often it rolls incessantly down the years,
Its effects no less corrosive, its whys and wherefores as insubstantial
As the air that sad boy kicked at in those final moments.
No service for us, then, no “closure”, whatever that may mean,
Only a continual repetition of the door flung open, the strangled cry,
The blackened, bloated face staring at the pair of us, forever separate,
In mute and expressionless indictment.