-directions from the gatehouse-

(William is now friends with Miss Ida Wardell)

the plot of ground reserved

for this elementary classroom music teacher

lies in a remote location.

this remoteness is due to years of constant

clearing and expansion of land

made ready for the onslaught of new inductees

moving her space of earth backward in time. 

her grave is marked with an actual stone,—

small, slender, bleached-white,

arching slowly at the head and standing

slightly out of plumb.

small chips in its stone at the edges

seem natural now and at its face the marble's etch

is in poor condition as time-weathered burnishing

diminishes clarity.

says here she died in 1966.

no reason. 

just.. "died".

the grave is unkempt; appears to be
years without company and, well,–– lonely.

standing there, I imagine the fullness of her face,

the impossible girth at the sash of her dress,

the sweltering mouth at the pitch-pipe's disk,

her narrow eyes rocking like metronomes

over her attentive, stiff-postured students.

I was one of them.

she surveyed the classroom,

eyeballs brushing across us

like bristles in the process

of shellacking something.

she was unique,— a blimp of a woman,

gaseously floating before the eager

moorings of our disciplined expressions.

we breathed in and breathed out in the collective,
picking-up the pitch of her pipe, plucked from the scale

and the true romance is found etched at the face
of a simple stone weathered by time, listing
on a distant plot of ground.

Wardell, Ida

Inexhaustible Pitch-Piper

born 1908 / died 1966

              

-Your Show of Shows-

everything appears to be

functioning normally.

the dishes are washed

and the rung-out dishrag's draped

over the faucet to dry-out.
the interior lamps are lit

casting light to a bronzed patina

the way Rembrandt liked it. 

the cat’s in its mode of discovery

walking to an empty bedroom doorway,

stopping in its tracks,
staring into the empty darkness
as if it senses something going on.

my father’s in the living room

standing at the blank-faced television

rolling-up the sleeves of the white

dress shirt he wore to work.

he’s the man of this house

and the Lucky Strike pressed

between his lips is there to prove it.

L.S.M.F.T., my brothers and sisters.

there’s a moment in time when time

seems to be suspended at this ancient house

when the oldman squats at the screen
and the family knows that when the dial

is turned to its on position everything could go wrong.

It’s droning like a dozen hornets.

the snow builds in intensity

the way the Big Bang aficionado likes it,
and shadows of substance appear like phantoms
within the phosphorescence.

Odilon Redon comes to mind.
we can hear them laughing behind the cathode ray tube.

another adjustment to the roll of his sleeves,
another drag of hot smoke sinking deeply into his lungs

biding their time before the diagnosis.

and then—

the horizontal goes crazy,
ignorant of its place the horizon.

the vertical twists with the tortured inaccuracy
of an amusement park's funhouse mirror.

it's all about recurring anticipation in the house

with the squatting Zenith. 

but—with his fingertips adjusting
as sure, as swift as with a surgeon's touch,
the oldman makes his move just the way we like it.

                                             c.1954