-for all the benchseat manipulators-

the old men are dropping like flies.

the strangers listed in the newspapers,—
the grandfathers, the uncles and the portuguese

guy who lived across the street who

dropped like a lazy fly ball
to the outfield grass on Tuesday
and is now ready for viewing.

I was young and lived through it

to what I am now which is old
but still living.

It’s hard to disapprove

of one's earliest yearnings,

those which are expressed

as a rite of passage.

even so, I was hesitant

to drive up there with her,

up the hill to the Narrows where

the forest blinds the standing water.

It was untrue when I told her

we'd go to the movies and then

cross the street to someplace nice to eat.

It came more easily to tell her

(after I stopped the car,
after I shifted to first gear
from the column and turned
the engine off and cracked the window,

after I pulled the lever up
and pushed the benchseat
back on its rails as far as it would go)

softly, cautiously, with but a modicum

of the current situation's half-truth, that I loved her.

-first meaningful act of disobedience-

they gave me a bike

and I was going to use it.

what did they think

I was going to do with it?

where was it they assumed
I wouldn't go?

I was the cave-dweller

looking toward the horizon

beyond every sight and scent

of my neighborhood planet,—

out there, over the mountains

beyond the clouds
far from the river,

the open gates, the broken fences

across the backyards of no-man’s-land,

across the stiff meadow grasses

beyond the billboards,

the backsides of the billboards,
the sides without pictures,
the sides with the architecture,—

southward where the mill's granite
walls are red-colored,

where the trees at twilight seem
dressed-up and dancing like newer women,

where sound seems muted,—

out there, into the black-hole where nothing
looks like anything I've known
or smells the same as before

and I won't be coming back.

they said: “don’t ride it across the street.”

don’t ride it across the street?

they gave me a bike for christsake.

where’d they think I would't go?

                                     Quequechan

-on another page-

It was then I realized

As the wafer of communion
Was placed with fingertip precision
At the flat-side of my tongue,

The wafer I couldn’t swallow,

The one that stuck

To the roof of my mouth,

From the tongue to the sacrament,
The holy eucharist,
The tongue sticking it to Jesus,

The tongue of Judas and the Priests —

The tongue later retracted
In a booth at Al Mac’s Diner,

A plate of eggs over easy,
With friends at the table,
That life was traveling forward

In another direction

From that of the doctrines
Of the Holy Rosary Church,

The church with its stone facade
Rising on a low-lying hilltop
Behind left field.

Inez at the Diner was more inviting —

The music of Jerry Lee Lewis
Romancing from the juke,

Superseding the Agnus Dei,— 
Inez of the Diner
Smiling as we sat in the booth at her section;
Inez, who wore an artificial flower
Pinned to the lacy collar of her dress of fading pink,
Inez, who called me "Honey"

And wouldn’t he have smelled like olives

And stale perspiration?

Wouldn’t Inez have let him in
To wash the crusted skin
Of his sun-burned feet?

Wouldn’t our dead friend be made living

And baseball made whole again?

So at the rail for the last time

I rose from a kneeling position,—

And on my way to the world outside,
When Jesus called my name for the last time

I said:— “Now who do, who do

You think you’re foolin’?”

                                        Fall River