He had, when it became clear
The dog was on his last legs,
Went to a canine memorial concern,
One of those somewhat well-intentioned marketing brainstorms
Which operated under the assumption
That what was good enough for master was good enough for Fido,
And the folks who ran the place dressed in dark suits
Which accentuated the notion that what they did
Was no different than going through the paces
Of sending Grandma to her final reward
(Though the whole thing carried out
With a wink and a nod,
All of which by no means bringing credit to man nor dog.)
He'd been put off by the whole fol-de-rol,
Though he'd sat dutifully through the videos and brochures,
Being possessed of the same damnable politeness
Which made a place like this possible if not necessary,
And he'd ignored the two or three follow-up inquiries.
The dog finally came to his rest
On one of those gray silent November days
Which were the harbinger of the locking season,
And he'd taken him down to the back part of his property
Where he'd had the soybeans in this year,
A spot where three or four of his dogs already resided,
And though there was no markers or such on the spot,
He reckoned that the fact it was a good patch of growing land
Was sufficient testament to their standing.

See that
under the cow?
That holds the stuff of life,
so pick it up and drink, just don't
kick it.

You get
lost in detail
(Augurs? Portents? Symbols?)
They shine: you'd be advised to do
As well.

Perhaps, dearest daughter, your continued absence
From these shores is very much a blessing
For even though your corporeal self
Resides an all but incomprehensible
Number of leagues away,
The occasional missive you deign to send
Serve as sufficient understudies for your particular role;
Indeed, one can almost feel the spittle
Rising as blunt instruments from the very pages themselves,


But then again, perhaps it is not so;
Not the odd angry recrimination
Sundry maddening, shrieking tales of woe
Blows which may not reach their destination
Though intended to mar the tend'rest spot
For even if perchance they reach their mark
These scattershot parries are all for naught,
For no matter what pains the barbed tongue bring,
The most **** pointed speech will fade in time;
Though slaps or scratches may utterly sting,
Such violence is not the ultimate crime.
'Tis the lack of your voice, or your foot-fall
Which is the unkindest cut of them all.

There are, dear daughter, oceans between us
(At your insistence, though I say this without rancor)
A buffer from the memories of our sad antics,
Pottery reduced to shards, doors slammed in such a manner
That the very jambs ached in regret,
The hinges wept in the weight of their sadness,
Though the human heart, mapped by its own wan geography,
Is immune to such trifles as mere distance.
We have tarried in foul gardens of sophistry,
Engaged in predictable shows of dramatics,
As if our outbursts can be measured in some calculus
Seeking to ascertain our devotion
In the rending of garments, the shrieking collapse upon the floor,
For it has been revealed to me
That the spectacle of our grand lamentations,
Worn by us like the finest silver-threaded garments,
Are no more than the strutting and preening
Of some noisome, foul peacock.
No, we must accept, indeed embrace, the notion
That our love is as imperfect as our selves,
And that we must approach its altar
Not with grandiloquence and haughty pomp,
But meekly, bearing the simple gift our person
Modestly cloaked in the simple black gown of humility.

And so there are things all about us,
Fine things at that:
Hills, perhaps gently rolling, perhaps ending abruptly
Courtesy of the ministrations of some indifferent glacier
Rolling in and then receding with equal diffidence,
The song of some unseen child singing inaudible lyrics,
All tinkling-bell-a-twitter,
Some grand art nouveau city tower,
Festooned with angels on the balusters, gargoyles in the cornices
And they are wondrous indeed,
All with their own histories to relate,
But imbued with the regrettable tendency
To all speak at once, with no inclination to await their turn
Leaving us flummoxed and forlorn,
Shorn of any way to glean what would be precious
From the ore of babble,
But there are those with a certain ear, a certain eye
(Though such eyes may be accompanied by lenses
Thick as the headlight on some ancient VW microbus,
Perhaps without even such limited acuity)
Who can sort such tangles, weaving them together
In such a manner where this cacophony
Becomes something greater than the sum of its parts,
New yet familiar, things we know as true,
As must be true, their presentation to us
Signaled by nothing more than a mere clearing of the throat,
The rustling of some smple garment,
And at such a moment we must proceed
All openness and open to all things
And thence govern ourselves accordingly.

It’s perfect nonsense to suggest that, whether venal or mortal,
It would announce itself with fanfare and hullabaloo,
All but taking out a three-column ad in the trades
To trumpet its arrival.
Its métier has always been the dimly-lit corner,
The whispered admonition,
The ****** room in a somewhat undesirable neighborhood,
And while it is certain that it accompanied us
As we emerged, still scaly and seaweed strewn, from the sea,
It did so on a light unsullied by moonlight,
Surfacing silently with the least desirable of piscine attributes in tow.

They have always been among us,
Preening and parading through their brief tenure,
Those acolytes of taking their final bows
While safely in their prime,
Ensuring the photos and screen-shots
Scattered on walls and tables
At their memorial service
Are the remnants of an eternal if truncated youth.
I would (having passed such a time anyway)
Demur to embrace such a notion,
As such an exit strikes me as the final half-measure
In an existence comprised of nothing but,
The process of having left hearts a-flutter,
Cleaved in half yet never made whole,
The tales suitable for guffaws and back-slaps,
But invariably involving merely one protagonist.
I have looked in the mirror, and wanly recognized
The lined face, the thinning and graying patch
Topping that sad apparition,
And I have resigned myself to the notion
That, when I am a thing of the past tense,
My remembrance will be in quieter tones,
The attendees with faulty aortas and rebuilt hips of their own,
And though the anecdotes about my final years
Will be short on notoriety and things
Not subject to the statutes of limitations,
Let it be remembered that I not only loved,
But lived that love as the contented part of a whole,
And that, though those days were not raucous
Nor involved more than one end of a candle aflame,
That I squeezed every **** last bit
Of all that time and tide had allotted.

It was, as the New York Times all but sniffed
(Even then, a haughty mix of bluenose and black ink)
Further proof the poor, misguided Upstate rubes
Were no more than ample fodder
For any tinhorn, two-bit confidence man to take for a ride.
Fair enough—it was, to the careful eye and unheated psyche
Clear as the azure blue sky that,
Despite the best efforts of acid wash and a year underground,
So obviously a statue as to be absolutely laughable,
And yet the vox populi came in waves,
Not only one-gallus farmers from the fields nearby,
But from the great cities near and far
(Chicago, Philadelphia, and, yes, even New York itself
To throw Hannum a quarter to view his gargantuan grotesquery
Just as described in Genesis itself, he noted solemnly
So many, indeed, that Barnum himself was divinely inspired
Not only to purloin the giant, but its prior owner’s epigram
As to the frequency of the manufacture
Of his too-credible customer base.
While there was (briefly, at least) some mystery surrounding
The origins of the brobdingnagian mass of stone,
It remained (to some, anyway) equally unfathomable
Why scores of folks would careen in unsteady coaches
The full length of the Catskill Turnpike,
With its questionable lodging and uneven roadworthiness,
Or patiently suffer the mosquito-laden flatboats of Clinton’s Ditch
All to spend the cash equivalent of two trips to the county fair
To see a perfectly good hootchie-kootchie show
Simply to gawk at an unevenly carved rock of questionable authenticity,
But that explained quite simply,
As the public always gets what the public wants.

If you put the question to, say, one Ben Haramed,
He would, as befits a wily old desert jackal,
Find such notions of faith and fidelity quite amusing--

(Following stars in search of something ephermal,
With no fixed exchange rate?
Will these specks of light find you shelter
Among throngs of shepherds and sundry fools?
Will your mewling, puking infant provide you succor in that cold city
Where no one makes time for you, save the pickpockets or strumpets,
Each of whom would pawn your drum
For a dram or string of brightly-colored beads?)

And, indeed, if you happened upon a certain wise and well-off trio
Ensconced comfortably in their lodgings several streets distant
From the temporary residence of the object of their pilgrimage
(It is only fit that we pay obeisance,
But to actually stay in such a place, well...)
They would certainly forswear any notion
Of the primacy of the gold piece and the blade
But if you caught them in a more comfortable, unguarded moment
You may able to infer quite correctly that,
While they would express themselves more elegantly
Than some rude wilderness bandit,
You could no more expect them
To exchange their coin of the realm for philosophy
Than you would expect the fold and kine
To keep perfect four-four time.

And yet we believe, in spite of the first-hand knowledge
That the descendants of Balthasar and Melchior can elbow their way
Past whomever they choose, and be greeted, all smiles,
By the bank manager, the lawmaker, the chairman of the board
That our works and our constancy
Shall be recompensed at a sound rate of return
(How could it be otherwise, for didn’t Our Story Teller herself,
Through stiffness of upper lip and fealty
To all things bright and beautiful,
Weather the Blitz as beautiful, as inspirational,
As a cross-Channel Joan of Arc?)
If only we are as steadfast as the chant of the Dies Irae,
As unwavering as the straightforward beat of a single drum
Which follows the procession down the main thoroughfare
As we make our final homecoming.

We hadn’t seen it for a couple years,
The film being a bit difficult to watch
Without dropping a few bucks
To stream it in all its black-and-white glory,
(A prospect which would have brought a grim smile
To a certain white-haired small-town banker)
Our laser disc scratched, our VCR beyond obsolete,
But there have been enough viewings
That certain tableaus
(Flower petals strewn, the glycerin tears)
Remain as familiar as the views out the front door,
And so on a whim we drove up to the quaint burg
Which espouses its claim to be Capra’s inspiration
With a tenacity which belies the season
(Though one look at the bridge which sits astride
A wan offshoot of the Erie Canal
Is sufficient for a startling bit of déjà vu)
Finding ourselves by ourselves in a restaurant
(The times after all, and it a weeknight to boot)
Surprisingly open, even though the town fathers
Had opted hopefully to decorate, as per usual,
The village streets to be as Bedford Falls-esque as possible,
And as we sipped our soup and munched our salads
We mused on how wonder and anxiety
Could walk hand-in-hand
(As we did on the way in and again on the way out)
And though our laughter was a soft, muted thing,
It tinkled in the manner of such things
Which enabled seraphim to gain their wings.

i.

The sisters are, like their brethren everywhere,
An amalgamation of gentle touch
And soothing words delivered in sepia tones
(Comrade, you will be up
And out of here before you know it)
In such a manner as to convince you
That they believe it to be true as well,
But I have made something of a living
In the interpretation of the unsaid,
And what I have seen in a certain knitting of their eyebrows,
An occasional tightness around the throat,
The set of the jaw as the doctor studies my chart,
And I suspect that this may be
The final station on my excursion,
The last listing on the timetable;
Indeed, as I click off the inventory of my own person
(The fever, the unsightly and damning rash)
I have come to the conclusion
That I may find the denouement of this particular tale
To be highly unsatisfactory reading.

ii.

I am at considerable leisure to think, reminisce,
And even, though wholly without purpose, to dream.  
On more than one occasion
I have drifted back to a certain train ride
(I was headed to the Congress of the Peoples of the East,
Not without some trepidation, I might add)
Traversing almost all of Mother Russia, from Murmansk to Baku.  
Oh, there was any number of wonders
To be viewed through the windows:
The broad, seemingly endless steppes,
The grandeur of the Urals and Caucasus
The wide, sluggish Irtysh,
But there were other sights,
Unsettling, almost portentous views as well:
Villages, burnt and abandoned,
Cows and horses so thin
Their hides appeared almost threadbare,
Peasants of all ages whose eyes gave evidence
Of seeing such pain, hunger and death
That it was a wonder they could still stand upright,
Or, indeed, have the desire to do so.  
We, conversely, rode, if not in the lap of luxury,
Comfortably indeed—no shortage of coffee and *****,
Even caviar on a more or less daily basis.
Finally, no longer able to contain discontented thoughts
(I knew my outburst would be reported back to the Comintern)
I said to the Red Army captain sharing my compartment
That it seemed incongruous, if not counter-revolutionary,
To be overfed when the backbone of the proletariat
Was starving and dying before our eyes,
That, surely, there was something we could do.  
As he walked from his seat  toward the window,
He smiled and said as he pulled them downward
Sometimes, the best thing we can do is to pull the shades.


iii.


Again, having a certain gift of observation
Proves to be a mixed blessing:
There are certain signs (the adjacent beds
Being placed a touch farther away,
A certain distance, physical and otherwise
By the doctors and nurses)
And it is clear to me that my remaining sunrises and sunsets
May be counted on fingers and toes,
And my musings have turned to my placement
After I am discharged from further ministrations,
And I find it somewhat amusing if not entirely suitable
That the epitaph upon my tombstone
(If I am afforded such a luxury;
It is far from certain that the pig-eyed Zinoviev
May not just have me thrown into some dungheap,
There to sate the desperate hunger of the cur and the swine)
Will be likely written in Cyrillic,
An idiom I found wholly perplexing and inscrutable.

He is, to his way of thinking, the only one wearing shorts;
The nine young men with him, baggy-wearing and body-pierced,
Swoosh-adorned from head to toe,
Sporting something which seem close kin
To blown-up Bermudas or women’s culottes.
Back in the day they would have been laughed right off the courts,
But it is not his day any longer, as he is constantly reminded;
He wears shorts that merit the term, old leather Converse All-Stars
Cracked and faded as the berm of the back roads
In this out-of-the way locale,
A faded and decades-laundered jersey
Bearing the name of a long-defunct auto dealership.
The kids call him “Jumping Toyota.”
Yo, Toyota—no dunkin’ on us tonight, OK?
Hollering and laughing as they dap and jump-and-bump,
Mimicking playground ballers in cities
They have never been within three hundred miles of,
And he smiles in grim resignation,
Knowing he might get a fingertip on the rim on a good day.
His game is strictly cerebral, horizontal now,
The muted, pastel joy of a solid, timely pick
Or well-thrown bounce pass
Has become his vehicle of blacktop epiphany,
And he eases up now and then on the offensive end
To provide succor to tendons and ligaments
Which, in spite of admonitions to himself
That at your age you need to take it easy, *******
Will still register their protests a very few hours from now
Leading to tortured grimaces and the occasional audible grunt,
As he holds his place on the third-shift line at the Alcoa plant
Bringing his co-workers to ask him,
In that hazy place between bemused and stupefied
Man, don’t tell me you’re still playin’ ball?
Once in a while, though, he will still drive hard towards the tin
And, eighteen again for the a snapshot of a moment,
He will stop on a dime and drop a jump shot
Making no noise whatsoever
Save for the whispery snap of the bottom of the net,
Sound every bit the same as it was
Before his knees and ankles went rogue.
Outside the chain-link fence, a young man plugged into his iPod
Bobs his head in time to some unheard song
As he leans in an approximation of nonchalance
Against a great old elm tree
(Branches bedraggled and drooping,
Giving it the air of some old warlock gesturing in mock-menace
Though his wand has gone a-gleaming,
His magic having deserted him as well)
Which bears a large painted orange circle
Signifying its imminent destruction.

As he sat the trash can back down gingerly
He sighed Well, it’s a long story.
We were drinking beer in my backyard at four in the morning
On one of those sticky September nights
Where sleep was more rumor than reality,
And, as I noted the time on the clock for the umpteenth time,
I heard a song outside my window;
Not some drunken caterwauling of “Danny Boy”
As rendered by some stray tabby in a Dublin alley;
This was…singing, like you’d hear on a CD
Or, perhaps, Live From The Met,
And at first I thought some poor sot with an artistic streak
Had pulled off the main road to sleep it off,
But the singing was punctuated
With the clatter of can-lids and the occasional grunt,
Until I understood that baritone and trash barrel
Were part and parcel of the same man.  

As I handed him a second bottle,
He recounted how his lifelong dream of riches, glory,
And a glorious career on the world’s great stages
Came to a sudden halt after a Manhattan debut
(I sang my *** off that night, he recounted)
Was met with mild praise, the odd bit of outright scorn
And a healthy dose of apathy.  
I ‘spose, he said between sips, I could have done all right
Givin’ lessons, singin’ bit parts here and there.
You’re on the road a lot, but the money ain’t bad,
But one day, just before an audition for a supporting role
In a regional production of Carmen
Up in Binghamton ******* New York,
He simply left the theatre, got into his car,
And drove some sixteen hours
Until he hit town here, and then he stayed.
But, I countered, why not go back?
The years of lessons and Julliard,
All for celebrating our refuse and squalor
With roadkill requiems, arias for rats?  
Well, some days it’s a hard way to make a living,
He said, stroking his chin thoughtfully,
But it does give me a venue to sing,
And, to date, I ain’t been panned by no **** cat.

Now how to figger what makes a feller tick?
They’re hot and they’re cold and they’re nothin’ at all.
(Th’ persuasive arts ain’t no match for a brick.)

A body can stand herself pretty and slick
But he’ll hem and he’ll haw and harrumph an’ stall
Now how to figger what makes a feller tick?

I’d much rather take on a lion that’s sick
Than a certain mouse backed up ‘gin a wall.
(Th’ persuasive arts ain’t no match for a brick.)

Wish I had a gris-gris or some other trick
So’s I could hold a certain feller in thrall;
Now how to figger what makes a feller’ tick?

Sof’ words and June moons—why, they ain’t worth a lick
If your life is just one big free-for-all
(Th’ persuasive arts ain’t no match for a brick.)

Your poor hawt cries a river an’ beats real quick
When love takes you down like a cannonball.
Now how to figger what makes a feller’ tick?
(Th’ persuasive arts ain’t no match for a brick.)

(In memory of Glen Slater)

Ya stupid sonuvabitch, the place is deserted!
It’s gotta be a ******’ night game, ya ******’ mook,
But though the parking lot had the forlorn look
Of a down-on-its luck strip mall on a weekday afternoon,
There was just the hint of activity and indeed a game,
A friends-and-family affair with the Cubs,
Losers if not particularly lovable,
So we departed the ancient Gremlin
(Ostensibly painted cab-yellow,
Though festooned with enough Bondo and duct tape
To make it difficult to tell
Where car began and slapdash repair ended)
Strolling toward the deserted ticket window
To drop the two-bucks per for upper deck seats,
Knowing that we would find amenable ushers
Willing to let us move down to the boxes
After it became fully apparent
There was no last-minute influx scrambling off the 7 train,
And we sat in the sun-drenched field level seats
(Though its warmth a relative thing,
The rays’ angle and the decidedly April wind
Requiring buttons to be snapped
And collars to be turned upward)
Viewing the spectacle of two clubs
Dutifully and somewhat optimistically
Performing the rites of Spring, each nine knowing
There would be no October heroics in their futures,
Their first-rate plays and foibles
Gathering our appreciation or scorn
Between gulps of over-priced watery beers,
And as we sat in this unlovely stadium,
Looking for all the world
Like some Bunyan-esque chipped ashtray
Plopped down on an unprepossessing landfill
(The hopes and wistful dreams of this children’s game
Perched uneasily atop ancient sardine tins and discarded rattles)
We agreed that we would do this again,
But it never came to pass, as life its ownself
Rolled on like the cap of John Pacella
(Invariably flying off his unruly mop
From the effort of launching yet another fastball
In the all-too-vain hope it would find itself
Somewhere in the vicinity of the strike zone)
Tumbling brim over crown in the swirl of the breeze.

We endeavor to construct boxes and file folders
This life being ****** complex
And messy to boot, so we approximate sanity
By filling compartments and writing thumbnail biographies,
And even though she packed the costume admirably
(Already forty, mind you, but nowhere near gone to fat)
Julie Newmar had already filled both outfit and niche
(And never mind Halle Berry’s turn,
Different raiment for a different time, after all,
And one suspects the next iteration of said slinky supervillainess
Will wear nothing more than feline-shaped ****** rings),
Not to mention she’d already entered our collective consciousness
With a frothy Noel novelty (unsubstantial, inconsequential
In and of its ownself, perhaps, but then one considers
The version foisted off on the populace by that woman
Who appropriated the moniker of the Blessed ******,
All phoned-in faux Betty Boop, and one reconsiders)
So this was who she was, the book closed and sealed
(English only, never mind the other three tongues she spoke
Plus three more she proficiently purred in.)
They say when she died, she did not go gently, as it were,
But screamed and yowled for all she was still worth,
And maybe it was the cancer, certainly enough to do the job itself,
But perhaps it was the notion
That her era of innuendo and intimation was all done,
That she was transitioning to the static, to becoming a legacy,
A permanence that was stalking her,
Murderous, insatiable, inexorable.

Thing is, Goliath is vulnerable,
And that’s all relative anyhow
(Six-seven and two thirty five plenty big for most folks,
But when every night ‘s just wrestling another six-ten or six-twelve,
All a man can do is grunt and shove best he can
Until the whistle says That’s enough, son.)
Anyway, it all beats you down eventually:
Sometimes it takes decades
(Even if you’re Moses Malone,
And have shoulders like the **** cliffs of Dover)
And sometimes you just land wrong,
Or somebody rolls up on your leg
And you end up as eight-point type in the transactions section.
You tell yourself you can get another camp invite,
Pick up some ten-day deal come New Year,
Maybe head to Italy, be the **** king of spaghetti basketball,
But everyone gets finality at some point,
And sometimes it just explodes on you,
Raining shards from every **** direction,
Leavin’ you nothing to do
Except the turn the ignition switch
And make that particular trip to nowhere in particular,
‘Cause that stone came out of nowhere and hit you flush,
As you never saw the **** thing coming.

They fall upon us over the spillways of time,
Burbling at us through some Radio Free Nostalgia
Courtesy of some college station sitting at the far left of the dial
Or streaky CDs at the rear of some forlorn shelf,
And we know them to be to be, if not outright falsehoods,
Among the more variable of truths
(As all truths are, if we’re being honest about the matter)
For when someone sets out to create the Great American Whatever,
It becomes quickly apparent that such paths
Are not straight and clear, but wind and double back upon themselves,
Replete with thorns and weeds with bladed edges;
Egos must be stroked, revenue streams and margins considered,
Leaving one’s primary legacy as a testament to compromise.

But to be a casualty is not necessarily to be a fatality,
And through the narrowness of a three-minute window,
Purveyed to us by quartets of chanteuses
Who were no strangers to compromise their ownselves
(So many staged photo shoots,
So many hokey Christmas songs and cosmetic-sale jingles)
We can glimpse momentary epiphanies,
Crescent-moon slices of the verities,
Which, if not the whole truth and nothing but,
Provide us with something to hold, something to hum
As we go about the tortuous business
Of making some sense of the whole **** thing.

Bovine-like, we shall meet our deaths
(Such is the scythe the reaper wields)
No matter that the final breaths
Come in stockyards or placid fields.
A slight rustle, perhaps, we’ll feel
At the loss of our distant kin;
Another gear, another wheel.
Oh well—that’s life—come on, tuck in.

What, then, shall be the epitaph?
No bromide written in some stone,
One would hope, for this life once shone
In a mother’s eyes, father’s laugh
Which still flower in memories
And vexes all our reveries.

There was no romance per se,
Certainly nothing which would lead poets or philosophers
To hold their hats over their hearts in reverent awe,
Perhaps one or two de reiguer chestnuts,
But they both were bit players in a milieu
Where the hustle was the coin of the realm,
And the comfort of their pro tem cohabitation
Was strictly a surface thing;
Indeed, she stirred from half-sleep
To see him out of bed, already more than half-dressed,
(Not at all surprising, this being the time of day
Where such young men made their money,
Some package to be delivered or message relayed,
All in service of some crumpled-up tenner
Never missed by its purveyor
But life's blood to its recipient)
And she watched silently
As he sauntered over to the window
To where a group of boys were out well past
What would be considered bedtime out in the suburbs
(It being the last weekend before
They would be corralled into classrooms once more)
And he leaned out the window,
Addressing them with a somewhat paternal growl,
Hey, my little heroes--time for you to get inside.
Gets cold at night 'round this time of year.

There’d been a factory here once,
Squat red brick structure
Suffused with too much noise and too little ventilation,
Built for the purpose of making typewriters,
Unwieldy, cacophonous clanking anachronisms
Whose time, like the town it occupied,
Had long since come and gone,
The only businesses on the sad little main drag
Being those shabby, tattered concerns
Which flower, improbable and cactus-like
At the intersection of the vagaries of memory
And the ascent of decay.

Nothing sits here now,
Simply an empty lot returning to Nature,
Although half-hearted attempts
To accelerate that process have not taken root,
As the soil, fouled by metal shavings, solvents,
And only God knows what else,
Has proved less than amenable
To anything save weedy shoots and scrubby boxwoods,
So it sits empty, impossible to build upon
(There is liability in every spike of crabgrass,
A potential lawsuit in every patch of clover)
And wholly impractical as parkland.
The firm which owned the site erected a fence
To keep whatever was in there in and everyone else out
(In their final addition of injury to insult,
The check they gave to the fencing company in payment
Bounced higher than a child’s rubber ball)
But a generation of winters and general inattention
Have left the chain-links a patchwork affair,
And though the “POSTED” signs remain
(Their original angry and officious red
Having faded to a benign maroon),
Enforcement of their edicts is spotty at best,
So we sit, unbothered and alone,
On an odd little mound at the back of the lot
As the dusk begins to take hold,
I, in an act of mad optimism, the peculiar positing
That there are good things yet to come,
Grab your hand, intertwining the fingers with mine.

i.

There isn't much light when you're inside,
Or at least in terms of natural light,
And if you're looking for a star to guide you
Through your thirty days, you're even more out of luck
Than you were getting here in the first place,
(In my case appropriating--almost-- a turkey breast
The Saturday after Thanksgiving,
Figuring no tired, overworked checkout girl
Would ever miss it; **** poor luck, nothing more)
The windows too narrow to climb out,
Too high to smash in anger or frustration.
Still, you can catch a bit of the outside world
The sky (this once, at least) more blue
Than mid-December has any right being
In this grubby, hardscrabble corner of northwest P-A,
***** old lake to the west,
Endless logged-out hills to the east,
Never-quite-boomed mill towns due south,
Up north Indian land where bootleggers and number-runners
Holed up once upon a time, the Senecas
Now having gone legit, Beach Boys and Barbara Mandrell
Fronting shell games which bear the Feds' seal of approval.
This is the Galilee to which I shortly return.

ii.

Time gets syrupy in the hole, moving slowly, lazily,
Fighting the laws of Newton and Einstein at every turn,
And when the ******* about lawyers,
The oft-repeated and off-key done-me-wrong songs
And respectful if somewhat impatient
Supplications to Jesus for speedy deliverance
Are no longer sufficient distraction,
A man begins to think and remember.
I met Easy Terry E. (so he called himself)
In the city lockup in Troy, or maybe it was Schenectady
(I have, after all, mosied up and down the Eastern Seaboard,
On both sides of the bars)
And let me tell you, for the only time in my born days
I wished these small-city holding cells had solitary,
As Terry E. not only had a chalkboard-scrape falsetto
Which constituted aggravated assault on the eardrums,
But also a predilection for non-stop yammering
About nothing and everything, punctuating his blather
With frequent high-pitched insistence
That he was a hermaphrodite,
And he would frequently taunt the guards by yowling
Baby, I got a lady's equipment down here.
Maybe you want to strip search me, honey.
(Such high spirits led to an inevitable outcome;
I heard a jailer up in Utica decided to quiet him down
By sticking Terry's head in a toilet, the swirlie
Ending up a minute or two longer than was advisable)
But I had been able to more or less ignore him,
As to that point he'd concentrated on ******* off
Everyone in the cells with the exception of me,
But my turn came soon enough
Oh, don't worry Peter, darling, I know your type.
Different, smarter than the rest of us
He all but sang in  my direction.
Mebbe so, I grumbled, just a few fluky bad breaks
Here and there, that's all.
Terry laughed and clapped his hands,
Poor sweet thing, a victim of that old lousy karma.
There was a philosopher…
And he stopped for a moment,
Seemingly trying to pick a name from the air
(Not that he could see anything floating in front of him,
As he wore horn-rims with lenses as thick and opaque
As the headlights of a '72 Skylark.)
So you're just taking a break here until your luck turns, mmm?
I laid back against the wall,
Hands behind my head and grinned.
Yep, I replied, things are due and then some
To start going my way.
Terry giggled once more, Well, you've got things
All figured out then!
Good, evil, right, wrong--just snapshots of the roulette wheel
In some infinitesimal sliver of time, and all we can do
Is put our chips down and hope the croupier is playing it straight.
Well, now that you've finally figured all that out,
I suspect you won't see the wrong side of the bars again.
And with that he turned his back on me,
Paying me no mind whatsoever
Until they turned me loose the next morning
With the stern admonishment
To trouble the good citizens of the Capitol District no more,
And as I think back to that moment,
I suspect he may not have been telling the whole truth
As he saw it.

iii.

And so I will be released from this small cell
In this small red-brick building
In the midst of this equally small red-bricked town,
And I will bypass the bars
With their potential for a cheap hustle
And various types and flavors of low-hanging fruit,
And I will dispense with a seat on some sad Trailways bus,
Seeking a ride (thumb hopefully, defiantly
Pointing upward to the sky)
On the old Grand Army Highway,
Then north on the Buffalo Road
And I will clamber down the embankment
To the Kinzua Dam and, shedding socks, shoes, and clothing,
And hang the cold,
I shall wade into the water, acclimating ankles and washing feet,
The dive headlong under the water's surface
To arise cold, cleansed, ready to move onward.

That little girl was up here a few weeks ago,
She says with as much enthusiasm
As the hourly ad hoc ambassador
For her small, unremarkable corner can muster,
And she laughs, I mean she played that little girl--
Zuzu, that's the name-- in the movie.
Poor thing moves pretty slow now,
Had to tromp around with a cane and all.
I smile, not much less weary myself,
(Not quite halfway from Toledo to Boston,
Miles to go before I sleep and all that)
Having pulled off the Thruway in the hope
The village supported something
Which might be open on Christmas Eve.
She chatters on, noting she pulled this shift
As a favor to a younger counterpart,
Since her children were old enough to stay on their own,
(Not to mention old enough to refrain from bouncing out of bed
Before sunrise on Christmas morning),
Mentioning that Capra visited here once and only once,
But was somehow moved enough to center his tale here
(To be fair, the place is quaint enough,
But no more so than any number of burghs just like it)
And so the village fathers have tried to make hay
While the snow flies, as it were,
The town's main street done uo in the spitting image of the movie, Although it seems different, even mildly unsettling,
When the tableau is not in two dimensionial black-and-white
The waitress and I, all but marooned alone
In this small-town Upstate bar and grill,
Exchange pleasantries (More coffee, Hon?
Visitin' family out in Boston?)
And I pay at the register (cash only here,
And I make it a point to tip very merrily, indeed)
Then stroll the couple of blocks to the municipal lot,
The bridge that may have launched
A thousand angels clearly visible in the distance,
Passing by a large, gray-brick building
Which have been George Bailey's mixed blessing
Now bearing the logo of a large multi-national financial leviathan
Based in Hong Kong.

The song played-- muffled, hesitant,
As if the tabletop jukebox
Seemed unsure of the tune’s suitability,
As out of place and time as ourselves,
It being Wednesday morning three A.M.
At the all-night diner on the Klondike Road
(The mills, going full-bore down the road in Montmorenci Falls
Making such a place viable, indeed necessary),
But we laughed loudly and nonchalantly
Between bites of nearly adequate cheeseburger,
Ostensibly unaware of all those inevitabilities
Which were tangible but unspoken, indeed unspeakable,
This being the last of the last summer not careworn,
Textbooks to be exchanged for neckties,
Plastic sandals swapped for sensible flats,
Other lives to take flight in other places,
A mere handful of evenings remaining
Before the clumsy process of untying
All that which had been loose ends from the beginning.

Would I go back?  In a sense, it does not matter.
There was always a laundry list of reasons
That it could not be, cannot be, will not be:
Irreparably meshed gears of relocations and reconciliations,
Gordian knots of logic and desire.
Still, in my dreams, I often run like a madman,
Chest burning as my sneakers slap the pavement in the darkness,
Back toward the diner, but it has been razed to the ground
(Likely the case, for all I know,
What with the mills silent and padlocked all these years)
And I paw madly, feverishly through the rubble
In search of some remains of those vinyl chanteuses of love songs,
Those epitaphs of our failures,
Those three-minute odes
To our compromised and conditional successes.

Custom, tradition, and the twang of steel guitars
Strongly suggest I should embrace my station
As the woman done wrong,
Weeping quietly in some dark corner
At the Come On Inn,
Or, even better yet,
Wailing in a full, tear-stained voice.
Know this; I will not Patsy Cline for you,
Any man or moral of the story,
Nor will I indulge myself
In some country-crossover measure of revenge.
I will march into that bar,
And play that song for whoever on the jukebox,
Dancing without a trace of regret or malice
And I will leave that old roadhouse
In the same manner I will live
The rest of my days here on earth;
Head high, chin forward, shoulders straight
Alone or accompanied
As I—and I alone—see fit.

It is generally supposed we come to this place
As a just reward for treachery and traitorousness.
Indeed, nothing could be farther from the truth;
Most of my compatriots her have blindly hitched their fortunes
To some flag, some shining dogma, our fates sealed
Through an unwillingness to be sufficiently self-interested,
The refusal to abandon ship once it became apparent
That the experience upon the rocks
Would be neither enabling nor ennobling.
My own case is illustrative of the rule;
My father, noble sovereign ascending to the throne
Via parlor tricks and the rustic embrace of folk legend,
(The fornication resulting in my birth brushed aside
As some accident of mistaken identity or enchantment)
Is celebrated, beatified really, in song and legend,
Yet I, who pulled myself up by my own bootstraps as it were,
Winning his queen’s hand and defeating him on the field,
Am consigned to this unhappy place in perpetuity,
Suffering demons who hiss *******! Usurper!
As they put me through my paces
(One takes their rebukes with a grain of salt;
They are all mad, the likely result of dealing with this glut of madmen.)
As I noted, the presence of myself and my brethren in this place
Serve as a testament to the merits of fidelity,
Which we commemorate daily, some days several times
(I confess it seems more than a touch silly,
But the necessity of creating distractions
Trumps other concerns in a locale such as this)
By staging caucus races, each participant addressing
The ******* in front of him directly,
Paying it fealty--My liege! My liege!--which is answered in turn
By a cannonade of noxious farting
(We assume the smells to be offensive,
As the atmosphere here is somewhat deleterious at all times)
All to the great amusement of those sprites
Who observe our machinations,
They in turn guffawing madly and urinating downward upon us
While we, as the acidic waste corrodes us, also cackle like lunatics,
Fairly shouting Ah, the gentle rain of Heaven--thank you, Lord!
Though, oddly enough, our laughter at times
(Most likely due to the aridity of the atmosphere around us)
Seems to catch a bit in the throat.

We’d known each other forever, or all the time that counted, anyways,
Sitting side-by-side on the bus from kindergarten
Until you and your mom moved up to Fifth Street,
At the cafeteria table, on the swings at rec
(Despite the considerable risk of contracting girl cooties)
And always but always on the gym bleachers for movie day,
Which, on the day in question, was "Paddle To The Sea",
And as I sat and watched the small, hand painted wooden craft
Improbably navigate the great blue ribbon
Bisecting the land of apple pie and Chevrolet
All the way to the Gulf of Mexico and into the great, blue ocean
It was as nothing else--that gym, the other kids
The comforting clack of the ancient eight-millimeter projector,
And, for that forty-odd minutes, even you--did not, could not exist.
As the lights came up, I looked over in your direction
Noticing the remnants of tears on your cheeks.
Hey, it’s OK to cry, I said
(Girls allowed such luxuries, after all)
But you whirled around at glared at me
(Even at that early age, stunned at the depth and breadth
Of my misunderstanding, my utter stupidity)
And said in a tone which neither sought nor brooked argument
That just can’t happen. No toy boat ever makes it to the ocean,
And for any number of days afterward
You would, apropos of nothing, angrily blurt out
How stupid, stupid, stupid that movie was,
And how you hoped they would cancel movie day from now on.

We had, nature taking its course and all that
(As I used to say to you at the time,
It’s not my fault you ended up with ****)
Our dalliance in that murky interval beyond friendship,
Fumbling about your bedroom
On those afternoons in-between sport seasons
Or on the old Friday night in the back of the balcony
At the old Rialto Theatre
(In its final death throes at the time, deserted enough most nights
I could have taken you right in the front row wholly unnoticed)
Though always within limits,
As you had no designs on becoming
Some drop-out baby mama patiently home-bound,
Spending mornings sweeping the detritus of the mill
From some weathered, crumbling front stoop
While waiting for me to come home from a spot on the line
As we lived happily hand-to-mouth ever after.

It could not, of course, have lasted.
The fall came where you headed off to Cornell,
An unlikely landing spot for a mill-town girl;
We sort of stayed in touch for a couple of months,
But come the tail-end of your second semester
You simply disappeared without a trace.
The sheriff’s boys up there had assumed you’d jumped
Into one of the scenic gorges
Which were the pride and joy of the town’s Chamber of Commerce.  
(I’d laughed in spite of myself, the notion that you would end up
In some pool below a waterfall or some shallows of an inlet
Almost too cosmically comic to fathom)
Though there was a rumor that someone fitting your description
Had dove into the Seneca Canal
(But clad in a bathing suit,
Like someone enjoying a brief, early-season swim)
And for the briefest of moments I had a vision of you swimming
Up to Clinton’s Ditch to where it met with the Oswego Canal
And the big lake, going up the frosty St. Lawrence
And thence to the very Atlantic itself,
But I knew that was a fancy, indeed an outright madness
Inconceivable in the small-town cosmology
Of a young girl intimate in the true nature of toys and oceans.

John Lee Townes nodded sadly, knowingly
From his perch at the Come On Inn
Heard the ambulance boys
Needed two trips to get her out
(But John Lee an untrustworthy witness if there ever was one,
Prone to drunken blackout and sober embellishment
One step from rehab and two steps from the loony bin)
Though the facts at hand
Were short on gore, long on the mundane;
Peggy Rabish (her possessions few, her jewelry cheap)
Was found bruised, but not ******,
Lying in a profane yet oddly peaceful position
Of mock prayer or sleep.
As passers-by gawked,
Whispering inventions, plausible and otherwise,
Concerning jilted boyfriends and rich aunts,
Rummaging through their own memories
In search of credible alibis,
The state boys, diligent and professionally bored,
Secured the crime scene in their yellow-tape fashion.
Suspects?  One trooper barked, ****, just look around here.
****-heads, drunks, welfare cheats,
You tell me who the hell isn’t?
The park manager nodded rhythmically, disinterestedly,
Half-listening as he turned his collar up against the chill,
His thoughts focused in filling this soon-to-be empty lot,
Vacancies and felonies being equally bad for business.

So we have remained,
With the constancy of stubborn and vestigial elms,
Through any number of moons and Junes,
Equally as many improbable springtimes,
Madnesses of petunias and potholes,
But with a fidelity relatively unstrained, untested,
Our travails being minor things,
Trivial as opposed to titanic,
Our hithers and yons no more
Than the muted triumph of simply carrying on
And we could ask, one supposes
Have we truly loved, then?
Such questions are best left to poets and philosophers
(Grandiloquent fools with time and inclination
For such lines of inquiry)
And though the panorama of our time together
Will be an unprepossessing thing,
No strings heating up and crescendoing
As the camera pans wide in a sweeping crane shot
Of great craggy valleys, the zenith of white-capped peaks
(The lumpy moraines of our landscape,
Merely bits of sediment moved half-heartedly by the odd glacier,
Providing rather uninspiring visuals)
We suspect, no we know, know in such a way
That it is as unremarkable as blinking an eye
Or making some unconscious sound
Which annoys yet endears in the same moment,
That we would be all, give all,
Unreservedly and unhesitatingly immolating
Any thought or concept of self in service of the other,
And the notion that all of that occurs
Away from the watchful eye of director or camera
Does not diminish it in the least.

We’d make the journey, Hannibal-esque in nature,
Either on foot (even on the most dogged of the dog days
When the antidiluvian tar on our side street would bubble up,
Causing our sneakers to make a rhythmic flik-wump
Until we reached those byways deemed worthy of asphalt)
Or in ones and twos on our bicycles,
Our locks, assuming we were not the wards of parents
Who were devotees of the shorn-to-the-skull “summer cut”,
Flying unencumbered in the breeze
As we paid occasional fealty to the rules of the road,
Our destination being the “variety store”
Shoe-horned into one of the narrow storefronts
On our unprepossessing main drag,
A cacophony of canned goods
And candy bars of uncertain vintages,
Novelty pens and girlie mags two-thirds obscured
In jerry-built wooden shelves toggled together
By some former paramour of the frowzy divorcee
Serving as empress of this nickel-and-dime principality.
We coughed up our dimes, hoarded and guarded
With the feigned nonchalance of royal Beefeaters,
In the procurement of Cokes, handfuls of Bazooka,
And always but always trim foil packs of baseball cards,
Which we’d unwrap breathlessly, greedily, hungrily,
Hoping our efforts would unearth an Aaron, a Mays, a Clemente,
But usually our reward would be some utility infielder,
Some second-tier relief pitcher or third-string catcher
Cards perniciously reeking of stale gum,
And one particular summer it seemed every pack
Contained the card of Larry ******* Burchart,
Clad in his full Indians uniform,
Smiling at some untarnished future
Just this side of the horizon, fully visible and all but realized.
At some point, we moved beyond banana bikes and baseball cards
(Our attention turning to pursuits more expansive and expensive)
Giving up children’s things and boys’ games and fanciful dreams)
And looking back, it seems that the smile on that baseball card,
(Ubiquitous as cockroaches at the time,
Now mourned for its absence)
Was more than a touch on the wan side,
That apparition in the distance undefined and indeterminate
Malignant in its very uncertainty.

Together we probed mysteries of the dark
Though you said true love was for losers and saps
(Oh God how I loved you, my Joan Jett of Arc.)

You moaned like a ****** those nights in the park
As I tried to snare you with all of love’s traps.
Together we probed mysteries of the dark.

I was a way station, no more than a lark,
Though I searched your eyes for a trace of perhaps.
(Oh God how I loved you, my Joan Jett of Arc.)

I sought to engender romance’s first spark
In the wake of unfettered zippers and snaps.
Together we probed mysteries of the dark

Our orbit of something completed its arc;
I sang Ave Maria, you whistled Taps.
(Oh God how I loved you, my Joan Jett of Arc.)

One morning the truth hit—cold, brutal and stark;
You’d left unannounced, leaving me to collapse.
Together we probed mysteries of the dark
(Oh God how I loved you, my Joan Jett of Arc.)

Her woe is a workaday thing,
Not the product of catastrophic illness
Or some wanton random tragedy;
It is simply the occupation of a certain stratum,
A predetermined prank of birth,
A random assignation to such a place
Where the world is a middling mid-week place,
With no illusions of weekend soirees
At some overwrought bungalow on the coastline,
But she will, if such an opportunity presents itself,
Wander down to the narrow refuse-cluttered public beach
And remove her scuffed and patch-stained old sneakers,
Taking a few precious moments to sit by the water's edge
To bathe and soothe the soles of her feet.

We know
the old adage:
he who plans, He who laughs.
Pray the laugh's not too bitter and
mocking.

He has taken rake and shovel in hand,
Taking advantage of the light,
Rare in these climes this time of year,
Still welcomed, though rendered severe
By the sun's reluctant trudge above the horizon,
The type which, sauntering through a window pane
(Falling upon a crucifix anchored above a cradle
Or some ancient, gilded frame
Containing a photo of some grandparent's wedding day,
Exploding into full undifferentiated diffusion)
May possess a dram of warmth, albeit resigned, nostalgic
A bittersweet reminder of what has gone by
(And in the shade, the air is filled
With the portentous chill of what lies a few months hence)
But there nonetheless as he tends to those final farewells
From the trees bowing to December's inevitability,
The droppings not the *******-esque bursts of October
(Those having been collected and consigned
To the normal corner of the back lot)
But dreary brown-hued things, not welcomed by eye nor heart,
Simply corralled perfunctorily and dismissed.
One could contend that such activity is unnecessary,
The mere vanity of all endeavor,
As the snow will come soon, and steady as well,
Performing the seasonal, cyclical function in its own time,
But he soldiers on nonetheless, a unseen one-act nearly-farce,
Painstakingly raking and bending and scraping
To leave his patch of green uncovered for a little while
Until the locking time comes to seal the earth's secrets once more,
To be revealed to those
Who shall receive the teasing ministrations
Of the fickle, fitful March equinox.

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.

We raise them well enough to a point,
These children sprung from our fancy and gray matter,
But they often prove unruly and recalcitrant,
Immune to both wise counsel and outright admonition
And so we exile them to some corner
Until such time as they are willing
To acquiesce to cooperation and a certain conformity,
Where the remain as sullen accusations
And though we scorn them as obstinate failures,
We give into (at least, in our quieter moments)
The suspicion that their shortcomings
Lay much closer to home.

i.

Such is their reward, then,
This graceful bridge bisecting the lake at Bemus Point,
Not far from the spot where Bishop Vincent
Parsed the geography of the holy land,
Narrow beaches fronting a higgledy-piggledy of cottages,
Most comfortable but staid,
Though the odd McMansion grotesquerie
Has sprouted here and there,
Courtesy of some frozen-food magnate in Buffalo
Or casino second-in-command from Niagara Falls
(Those more famous waters, apparently,
Insufficient to slake ones thirst for the gaudy)
In any case, likely no more than admired from afar
By those generations of boys
Who, leaving their spot on the line at Crescent Tools
Or fields rife with bumble-striped heifers,
Never returned, drill press unmanned, corn crib unattended.

ii.

You’d been on those waters once, however,
Spending an afternoon both bewitching and idyllic
On a dock fronting a relatively humble beach bungalow
(A friend of a family friend or relative’s place,
The whos and whys lost to the manila folders of recollection)
With a girl of ten, perhaps twelve at the outside,
Beautiful in an untrammeled manner,
Or at least primarily, unconsciously so,
And you remember her having green eyes
Which utterly belied description
(Though that was all long ago,
Such reminiscence likely no more than the rheuminess of memory,
And you have not returned to that shoreline since.)

iii.

Such daydreams are perilous, on many levels,
At seventy miles per hour even more so,
And you shake yourself back to the present
While approaching yet another bridge
(Humble span noting humble beginnings)
Honoring the region’s most famous daughter and her husband,
Who did indeed have much ‘splaining to do,
As you proceed eastbound toward Salamanca
(Wholly owned by the Seneca Nation,
Those non-native descendants of Mertzes and McGillicuddys
Paying rent and fealty to the tribe each year)
And thence to the slump-shouldered hills
Which shelter the sauntering Allegheny,
The pines thick, green, inscrutable,
Beyond our everday squabbles,
Answerable to nothing but time itself.

(for Alice Bridgwood)


At some point, we simply say to hell with it:
Whether undone by the shortcomings at our craft
Or by the simple bulk of our mere humanity,
We come to the conclusion that certain mysteries of the universe
Shall remain exactly that—oh, we’ll still have
The odd glimpse of the Platonic,
The glimmering flicker of epiphany
Bestowed upon us a few frames at a time,
Grainy and Zapruder-esque,
But, by and large, we will remain sheepish
As some television weatherman who,
Though ostensibly trained to understand the behaviors
Of sluggish storms making their way lugubriously from the Southwest
Or brisk mid-February Alberta lows,
Must admit he, too, was bamboozled
By the sudden deluge or foot-plus of snow.

What, then, do we make of one
To whom the inscrutable calculus of the spheres
Is an open book, as simple as connect-the-dots
Or some child’s paint-by-numbers
(But augmented with shading and shadow
Until the picture is not simple rote coloring
But something else, something finer and all her own),
Whose words move us to follow where she may lead,
Like medieval peasants, dirt poor and bewitched,
Who flocked to the Holy Land
Following the charismatic little shepherd child,
All hayseed and bucolic charm
(Yet all of that simply myth arriving whole cloth,
A mish-mash of sloppy scholarship and errant translation;
She’d have sussed it in an instant)
Hoping that some smattering of his grace
Would trickle down upon them,
Not unlike the prayer of the farmer,
His lands parched and salted, hearing thunderstorms
Rumbling in terrible grandeur in the distance,
Hopes the odd drop or two reaches his fields.

In fact, they will, at certain times in certain locales, toil or spin,
For sometimes the exigencies of the gray and workaday world
Are immune to the notion that there exist rare entities
Which should be simply allowed to be beautiful,
No more and no less—still, how remarkable it is that,
Whether they be grown in fertile, well-tended soil
Or in a ***** dump chock-a-block with used condoms
And the unfortunate by-products of unhappy liaisons,
They bloom nonetheless; indeed, once they are cut
And arranged just so, the man who tends the vase
Would be wise to remain somewhat circumspect
As to their origin and pedigree.