-Left behind-

I held back for a moment

Allowing the mourners to shuffle out;

Soft-talking, respectful smiles,

Handshakes all around as if congratulating

One another on their ability to survive. 

We’d decided on a closed casket

With a framed 8x10 glossy standing

On the lid at the head.

I think it’s the head.

The thirty year old air-brushed color pic

Has him sitting healthy, smiling and leaning forward

At a severe angle, typical of studio portrait photography.

Maybe I should have opted for the Extreme

Measures alternative.

He’d be beeping away in a warm sleep

In the starchy room where I left him

To die overnight.

He travelled the distance necessary

Selling the company’s booze everyday

Miles from home where the ocean is,

Where the restaurants thrived in summer

Then shuttered his sales in winter

Returning home through the seasons

Dropping his heavy keys in the milk-

Glass saucer kept for them at the door.

He bequeathed to me

His corner across the active

Street where we lived;

The platitudes of his relations;

The unrealistic assertions of linking

Almost everything I did

For years to come, with him.

He bequeathed to me his half-

Measure of my birth and my youth.

I said: "We'll take this one".

It’s not the most expensive.

It's the least expensive.

It's bronze-colored.

Others were tantalizing,

Whispered as built of exotic woods.

I held back for a moment.

But in the end, I didn’t think

We should waste the money.

                                    Fall River

-Frederic the Enforcer-

From a mill-town poet's perspective

Let’s travel to the ends of the earth;

pedal fast, west on Bedford to Quarry and points south,

cross Pleasant into the Flint section of town, cross Brayton Avenue,

rolling ever southward, navigating the dead Providence to New York

rails overgrown with meadow-grass to where the gravel road

stops our bikes in their tracks, where the granite walls
of textile mills sit heavy-footed in an unfamiliar landscape.

We don't recognize such stone.

We have no place of our own in the deep southern territories.

Fatso Freddy "Butch" Dagata wants to beat-up

the kid who raised his frantic little hand in class,

telling Miss Pollard that “Frederic did it”.

The little shit disappeared before the 3:30 bell,

now the kid’s going to get a beating

and we pedaled southward to sign-on as witnesses.

Freddy was heavy-set and his head was flat in the back,

without any sign of an anatomical curvature of the skull

as it sliced straight down like a mid-meal holiday ham,

plumbed to the back of his neck. I often wondered if he knew.

We found the kid with his mother

sitting on the porch stairs to his house.

It looked like my house;

three tenement, weather-beaten shingles,

always appearing to be waiting for something else.

From the outside I could hear the inside;

the openings and closings, the shouting and the music.

It sounded like the pulsating beat of my house during an ordinary day.

Sitting on the stairs, the kid's mother looked like my mother.

The kitchen apron wrapped around her housedress, and leather-

flats graced her feet.

Her jeweled eyeglasses had the same kind of wings,

and when she saw us straddling our bikes she rose with the force

and strength of her own granite-quarried neighborhood,—

stone-firm in the face of Freddy’s line-of-fire.

This is the place where the same kind of mothers lived;

her kid above the others of his kind.

If there's a beating to be had, she'll be the one to dish it out,

not fatso Freddy Dagada. 

Her son was weak and she knew it.

She was not weak.

“Boys! Why are you here?—

And you, tough guy. Why is the back

of your head so flat?— 

Turn those bikes around, and go home.”

And so we did.

-the all natural dream / a dramatic reenactment: 

sitting with my girl at the bar

late into the nighttime hours,

Bukowski came to me mumbling

about the universe advising me

to jump aboard for the long haul outbound.

he seemed to know a lot about it, but

even so I was hoping it wasn't true.

he told me of how he stripped-down last night

with a local barfly, but before sunup she ran out on him

taking his best poems, leaving only the scent of them in her wake.

Bukowski looked like he should stink with B.O., but

he actually smelled pretty good,— like Prell shampoo.

I listened with interest when he said something about his cats,

in that he had 6 of them and they never show-up

in the same room at the same time.

staring blankly into space he said: “I’ve never

seen them all in the same room at the same time..”

I asked him how he could be sure that he had 6 cats if it was true

he had never seen them together at the same time in the same room

to which he replied: "you callin' me a liar?"

then Bukowski punched me in the face, strong-armed my girl,

and together they stumbled out of the bar and into the night.

           

                                             

-William and the whale-

I happened upon the short-finned pilot whale
stranded dead at Chilmark, South Beach on the great

coastal island of Martha’s Vineyard.

It seemed to have been attacked by a predator

as the trauma to its snout was severe.

the pilot whale, an oceanic dolphin was young,

older than a calf, but not fully grown.

there was little evidence that beak-pecking sand or winged-

scavengers were responsible for the wounds to its snout
leading to the assumption that a great white shark was responsible.

In the fierceness of saltwater, great whites seldom eat the entire kill

at one sitting as do lions feasting over rare wildebeest rump on the dry savanna. 

the high tide rolled and tossed the carcass onto the narrowing crest of the beach

without ceremony. the low tide left it there.

the high tide wouldn't reclaim it, and with closer observation I noticed

that the whale had recently been tagged by marine biologists from

the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, who examined the wounds,

measured its length, estimated its weight and its age, cataloging their conclusions

more for the science on the feeding behavior of the great white shark than for

the pathology of the whale.

I encountered the oceanic dolphin, the dead young pilot whale,
where the sand-plain of the island meets the turbulent tides of the North Atlantic
in the cold of a brilliant South Beach sunset in late December, 2009.

  

-The phone call-

Beyond the dense

head-high hedge at the grapevine

across the yard next door and up the stairs

to the second-floor tenement,

the Pieroni family lived much the same

type of life we lived in our tenement,
called "our house".

From the north-side windows, the Church

could be seen rising from the slow hill
beyond left field,— and from the south, the junkyard.

The matriarch next door,

an aunt on my mother’s side

whose name was Olympia, called “Lee”—

was the person my mother would call

on the telephone whenever she determined

that I had a "fever" and was in need

of an immediate enema.

Olympia would carry the orange bladder

and its ominous black-tongued tentacle

across her yard and through the kid-

fashioned portal of the hedge to our yard

and into the first floor tenement, my house,
where I was found under my bed

tucked into the farthest corner of the wall.

The broom-head swept me out.

Water warms on the gas stove.

At the kitchen sink,
Olympia’s systematic procedure

was “captivating” to witness,

akin to wartime prisoners transfixed

at the cold preparation of North Korean bamboo shoots.

I'll not testify herein on the merits of what happened next.

  

Olympia was small of stature,
a formidable woman and one hell-of-a practitioner.


                                                  Quequechan

-Man and his machine-

Late winter snowfall.

Not much accumulation.
Deep cold, though.

De-ice the front stairs.
No need to clear a pathway to the car.

I'll start the car.

Strong startup.
Turnover sound's good.

Strap in.
Seatbelt click sounds good.

Cabin heat and defrosters on

Full-blast.—— good function.

Gasoline reading looks good.
Dial sweeps to F, hard-over.
Instrument display function bright and clear.

(Fidget with the touchscreen)

Navigation systems functioning ok.

Car's where it’s supposed to be.

Little green dot is where we are.

Radio sound-check ok.

Speaker balance good

Front left and right good

Rear left and right good

Sound at the equalizer checks-out.

Engine RPM good function.

Driver-side power window down and up.
Good function.
Passenger side power window...umm..
One moment...

Uhh..window seems frozen.

Button's non-functional.
Light's red.

Driver side checks-out ok.
Auto down and up, check.

Passenger side still negative-function. Umm...
Uh...passenger window still no go.

Light's red.
Umm..still negative-function.
Release first safety.
First safety released.
First safety.
Release second safety.
Second safety released.
Second safety.
Umm...bomb bay door circuits still negative-function.
Light's red...uhh..
"Three miles to target"!
Umm..
"Three miles to target"!
Bomb door circuits still negative-function...umm..
uhh..

Hyundai from the Swansea driveway

approaching the ICBM complex at Minsk

"Alice"

I haven't seen the painting in years,

and as I recall, the cold-

water two-room flat depicted was as stark as it was
when I saw it on television as a kid, although
this picture's plane is colored in acrylic paint.

Within the translucent parameters of the surface,

Alice is standing to the viewer's stage right at the heavy
claw-foot table of the kitchen, where a baked ham sits

at the midpoint, ready to serve, sliced through the bone.

supper table

breakfast table

confessional

newspaper lounge

nucleus of a working man's latest scheme
nexus of bedroom and toilet––  

the hub of her planet.

A common Public Transit Authority issue cap
is seen sitting atop a chest of draws, misplaced

in the kitchen, but convincing, here.

The weighty chest is pressed to the horsehair wall,

the viewer's stage left, adjacent to the narrow interior doorway

to a darkened room as foreign to her now as it has been to the viewer.

Austere in her posture, Alice stands at the table.
At a right angle, a carving knife is held in place

by the grip of her hand, from the apron outward,

the apron, tied in a bow around the waistline

of her housedress, the blade

transfixed toward the open
bedroom doorway, — the portal we assume

leads to somewhere which will never be seen.


recalling the first sight of Leonard Dufresne's "Alice" 

  

-Cleo-

Direct from a breakfast of “Friskies Seafood Sensations”

my cat “Cleo”, (named after Cleo Laine the jazz singer,

NOT Cleopatra as some have assumed)

comes to me pantomiming whether or not
I thought there was a “cat heaven”.

I should answer in the affirmative.

after all, she’s only a few years old

and the truth when spoken aloud
could be depressing for both of us.

She's got Odilon's face!
Those olive-green eyes!

(curious how stiff and sharp

her whiskers are,— like pond reeds)

and when she sits at my feet like this

her tail lies straight back, like a length of pipe.

“Here. Go play with this”!

and I toss a jingling ball of textile fabric

across the carpet.

She's non-responsive.

So I answer her question directly to put an end to her curiosity:

“No. No cat heaven. Don’t be silly”!

Well, now she knows.

She licks the inside area of her hind leg
lifted above her head

for... I’d say 30 seconds and then

has a drink of water at her food station on the floor,
tucked against the wall at the end of the kitchen table.

So that's that. I know I've done the right thing.

What I don’t know is,
how many of her remaining lives has she used-up
in order to find the answer.

At the window, briefly

The old man who lives in the big house

overlooking the Bay at the southern end of the road

returns from his walk with his aging Siberian Husky.

There he goes, across my westward line of sight at the window,

holding the leash in his right hand and a small plastic see-

through baggie in his left hand.

The pair walk southward, the direction toward his house,

it appears, after the performance of the husky's necessities,

although he seems to have a few last squirts available for

the madly-sniffed base of a tree and a lesser few for good measure

alongside the lower quarter of a healthy bush.

The old-timer wears dark prescription sunglasses whose lenses

seem the size of teacup saucers, and as thick as two

diner pancakes if placed side by side upon a heavy, utilitarian plate.

His posture is curved forward at the torso which is to be expected,

and his face exhibits an unflinchingly stern expression, also to be expected.

He clutches the neck of the baggie containing the solid remnants of

the morning's imperative, firmly, his forearm running parallel

to the road ahead, bent at the elbow and at a right angle to his torso, although

his posture skews the sharpness of the angle to some degree.

The forearm rocks like a mechanism set

to open and close something repeatedly.

A young woman peddling her bike, zips passed him

going the other way, northbound toward the avenue

with a loud, cheerful “Good morning”! exhaled

from a healthy set of lungs, her fast bike, thin as a whisper,

quickly clicking through one of its 30 gears, and disappears from view. 

Slower-paced, the husky trots ahead,
leaving a little slack in the leash, perhaps out of sympathy,

but otherwise seeming to be uninterested
in the chance meeting between the two human principals.
They too, disappear from the strict parameters of the window,

leaving in place the unoccupied, brilliant late summer landscape.

(This visual phenomenon is known in art circles as closed-form imagery,

in that, intellectually we're aware that what we see within the frame's

structure, has a beginning and an ending, sort-of, neither of which

can actually be seen.)

I was fortunate to have witnessed the moment;

an old man at the portal to an eternity of all things left somewhere else,
and the young woman riding fast into the prime of her being, and
a good-looking Siberian Husky with a pleasant disposition,
cast in a landscape framed exclusively for their 15 second exhibition.

Swansea