-Meckelberg Requiem-

I have a stake in the life

Of Edward Meckelberg.

Now I owe money to all the right people.

I can’t afford my car or my house.

I can’t go to church because it’s not the same.

I’ve been around the block and

Went to school to be told

I could be anything if only
I'd want to amount to something

And simply apply myself like Edward Meckelberg,

One row to my right and two desks down.

I was good-looking

And can prove it if I have to.

I had girlfriends and they were nice.

When asked: “is she nice?”

I’d answer: “yes, she’s nice.”

"nice" meaning "she got a good body?"

Edward Meckelberg?

I don’t remember him with girls.
I remember him as a kid with brains.

What I wanted to do was lean

Against the back-row wall
In the chair of my desk

Being inattentive with the tough guys.

Sitting at the desk in front of me,

Barbara Amaral was a daily distraction,—

One of those dark-haired Azorean beauties

I’d mine from the nuggets at the riverbank

Down by the Housing Project, restlessly
Preparing itself at the faceplate of the setting Sun.

It might have been interesting had I taken

Edward Meckelberg along in my travels

Below the Hill, just once,—

Me on the red working-class Schwinn,

Edward on his snazzy

Black English Racer, to have him

Experience a sweeter definition,

If not in the process of amounting to something,

At least in the art of simply applying oneself.

-instrument of bicycle-

there wasn’t a chain-

link fence erected could stop us

and we looked at them as invitations,

slow-riding our bikes across the weave of metal

swiveling the handlebars for balance

on the hunt for things of interest.

old man Rachlin’s junkyard was best.

he gave-up long ago, tolerating

the breach in the overhead barbed wire

cut by our predecessors and handed

down to us, their bikes

lying in wait at the gutter on Healy

behind my house, passed its grapevine,

the craggy garden of tomatoes and weeds

under the clotheslines,

then through the battered wooden fence

to the junkyard where our bikes,
same as their bikes, were laid down to wait.

the proofs are in the telling

herein of therein— the pictures to be drawn

behind the eye from what was seen.

so I go home again to look around,

pan-handling,— taking what’s mine

along with the stuff belonging to others.

I bear witness to what was witnessed

on the inside and outside of residence.
the junkyards taught us that a time will come

when things are let go, by choice, by reason,
by collision,— that there’s a reason decisions
are made at the last of moments. the bicycle

is the instrument of our explorations.

who then was to know its use was to keep
the heart beating?

we’re set upon a foundation of here and now,

our bikes rolling with purpose always being half-way there,
across the little roads connecting to our testament.

                                               

   

-southend rhapsody-

after you eat the entire box of jellied "DOTS",

(it’s fun to put as many in your mouth

as humanly possible, roll them around

with your tongue 'till the sides of it hurt,

sucking-up the sweetened saliva

before it dribbles from your mouth)

open the flap at one end

and with your fingertips rip-

away a small square at the far

edge of the flap to serve as a mouthpiece,—

then crease again carefully and refold

the flap, slipping it back into the slot

from whence it came, so the box

looks to have the little dark entrance

to a long defunct anthracite coal mine.

testing both ends for fit along the seams,
blow mightily into the little hole.

now multiply the high-pitched squeal emitting

(a squealing more tortured

than that of the slit pig) by one hundred
or more, and you’re probably

a kid at the Plaza Theater on Saturday afternoon.

an old American poem-writer (me) once opined:
“If you shake a full box of "DOTS" nothing happens...”

this is because, like the nuclei of atoms,

or Homo habilis, the "DOTS" seek to bond within

the community of their own kind; the same would be true

for ballroom dancers and certain groupings of Italians.

but an empty box of "DOTS" will produce a sound

not to be reproduced by even the highest

registers of the long and narrow reed instruments.

next week's lesson: “why flatten the empty popcorn box?”


 Quequechan / the early years

                                          

-playbill-

Amy the funeral director

is an attractive young woman

who lives down the road

whose family members are long-time

friends of my family members

beginning with her grandparents

and my grandparents, when

the topography was graphic,

made of wood, was family

and neighborhood oriented

and was bordered by landmarks

most notably, Bart’s Drugstore

to the west beyond Marzilli’s Bakery

down Bedford Street, separating

the exaggerated excessiveness

of the Italians

from the more archaic and stringently

oriented Portuguese,—  and where

her grandfather took-up shop on the Italian

side of the line,— this side of Bart’s.

still, the funeral home was considered to be

Portuguese-owned and run

and as the Italians had no funeral home

to call their own,

concentrated their efforts toward the business

of two-chaired barber shops.

“Hey, Paesano! Why you wanna

the duck’s-a ass-a for, huh?” 

Amy, who is good-natured,

bright-eyed with a wonderful smile,

a nice ass, a full set of teeth,

when the time is right, will bury me.

she also performs on stage

in regional theater,— most often

in the stage productions

of standard Broadway musicals

produced by my sister’s theater company.

Godspell’s the latest.

the packed house was expected

and I’ve been told that Amy,

a locally trained mezzo, sang Robin with clear

projection and beauty of tone

and if I play my cards right

I’ll have an inside track to a handsome

discount when I reach the slab.

-Perspective-

I'll take a short drive

Then a short walk

Deep into the west-end of town

To the river,

Navigating the spiked,
Rough-meadow grass
Where the biting thistles
Cling fast to my socks.

I've come here
In order to take the measure
Of what’s left of the abandoned
Railroad tracks
Running southward to Providence.

A few of the old boxcars remain,
Broken as they are

But even the bums ignore them.

Eastward, the granite
City rising behind me

Looks like a battered
Heavyweight
Lifting from the crouch
To deliver or take the final blow.

It's a short walk
Then a short drive westward,
Crossing the bridge spanning the river

And looking eastward across the water,

The city is inhabited but motionless.
The compression of the tenement houses
Clinging to the hillside seem timeless
In their tenacity to exist.

It's the structure which draw me in.

Its sleeves
Are rolled to the elbows
But it looks weary.
Its hair is cut sharply

But its fingernails are dirty.
It doesn't appear interested
In trying to convince anyone of anything
And maybe I traveled westward from
The riverbank to the riverbank

Looking to find something I long ago knew.

                                             Fall River

  

-proof of being-

The skins of Lupini beans cracked

Between our teeth

And the cheap Bohemian beer

Lingered sharply at the edges

Of our tongues from behind
The towering street-side billboards.

What separated the kids of the Park

From the sidewalk's wise-guys 

Who crossed the Billboards
To the doorway of the  raucous
Marconi Club,

(A few small steps for man)

Was the waiting rite of passage.

To become a grown-up

Takes a number of run-throughs;

The awkward

Movements of fingers in the pockets,
The bobbing heads,

The looking around nose-sniffing

And the occasional

Spit-squirt from between the two

Leading teeth.

“Whistle” DiCarlo was the younger

Brother to the fat DiCarlo Twins

Who smoked big cigars and walked

Bedford Street side by side

With an imposing girth running gate to gutter.

DiCarlo the younger, dealt jars of Lupini beans,
A local delicacy,

And quarts of Bohemian beer, a local nightmare,

From the Club to the wise-guys when the Twins

Were threatening the atmosphere someplace else.

We swigged through the bottle's lip, rubbing
The wet knob down
With the flaps of our our shirts
For the next guy's swig and smoked cigarettes

In the meadow behind the blind of the billboards
In the swiftness of our journey into manhood.

Some would say the Billboards are long gone.

Some would say the Marconi Club has altered
Its direction away from what it was meant to be.

Some might say that “Whistle” DiCarlo is dead,—

That his brothers no longer puff fat cigars

Swaggering side-by-side between the gutters and fences
As if they owned the street of the neighborhood
Where everyone else happened to live.—

But who among the living would dare say such things?

                                           Quequechan

-destination-

I’m what you might call

a semi-reclusive character.

I go out, sure.

sometimes to the burger joint

down the road.  sometimes
ordering "to travel," eating on the bench

watching the women.  sometimes
in the winter I drive to the ocean,

the part at the edge of it where it breaks
like an infinitely horizontal pane of glass
where I stand moaning: “yeah baby, that's it. right there..”

Atlantic's two-times itself,
an inverted right angle
from my line-of-sight, one line to the east,

one line to the south.

so I’m what you might say, at the point of intersection.

call me geometer.

don’t tell me I don’t go out.

ever listen to Threnody
to the Victims of Hiroshima

when you’ve got a headache?

It may seem like the logical time to listen.
but if you're not on fire

you're not even close.

starting at the point of departure

plotting the unresolved destinations

with that screeching from the speakers going on

and after only a couple of miles,

the decision has to be made: east or south.

but what’s interesting is the Threnody

blasting from the cars speakers out the windows
and the aftermath of it seen through the rear-view mirror.

Hyundai, the new Enola Gay.
call me Mr. Tibbets.
don't tell me that I don't go out.

so it's east today.

eastward toward the Cape.

or a drive to Spain if I have a mind.

-poem in waiting-

if I last longer than my friends,

if I outlive them and i’m not too old
to tap the keys as if speaking, ‘tho silently,
to those who stop by on occasion,

those who ran fast between

the base-pads, those who were
uncontrollable, unruly,— the back-row nuisances,  

those more reverent than i, sticking it out

for the long-haul, the ones with cars not

belonging to their fathers, the smarter, the lazier,

the fatter, the ones living in actual houses, split-

levels and ranches with picture windows looking

out over anything there was out there to be considered

a view,— 
those who looked over the park, the gas station

and the tenements where the girls
took-up residence with their grandmothers,

making them seem more approachable,—

those who’ve killed themselves off,

those with good careers raking-in the good bucks,
with the good wives with meaty legs,— those who

were paid by the month,..the month! who ever heard

of such a thing,— all of them, if i outlive them,—

I’ll dig them up regardless of respect for the dead,

dig them up improperly, impatiently, rudely if need-be,

interrupting their rest, shaking and rattling their bones

singing our song to them, dancing again,—
through the harshness of first cigarettes, the first beers,
first kisses, first embraces as if they meant something
beyond death,— 
gathering in my arms, if i outlive them,

those things that were revelatory, things disregarded

as we grew old apart from each other, old and tired,
sick and surrendering —  and for chrissake, wake up!
wake-up! i'd sing if i came to outlive them.
wake the fuck up! i’d be singing.