-the beginning-

my father and my mother

met some five years before

they’d dance in each other's arms

across the linoleum floor

in the basement of the Sons of Italy Hall

on Covel Street at the afternoon reception
following their wedding.

their beginning went something like this:

he’s playing in a pick-up game

of tackle football on the outfield
grass of Columbus Park

and she sees the game playing-out

beyond the chain-link fence across the street

from her living-room window on Bedford

between the ESSO station and Marzilli’s Bakery.

she calls her friend Francis DiNucci, four houses up
where the standing billboards at the edge of the meadow
preach colorfully of something for everyone

and with Francis in tow, she crosses the street,
standing at the fence, breast-high, to watch them play.

she is less than seventeen but not less than fourteen.

she’d seen him at other times (from her window
overlooking the street corner during twilight

when she's required to be indoors)
hanging around at the right-field fence on Stinziano
with his tough-guy friends, leaning on the sweeping
heavy-metal fenders, smoking cigarettes and swigging

Cokes from the bottle.

now his buddies are carrying him off the field-of-play
with his neck broken from a cheap-shot delivered
by a Ruggles Park roughneck, and the story goes:

as his teammates carry the young man
who one day will become my father
through the chain-link gate at the backstop
behind home plate and into the backseat
of crazy Charlie DePola's snazzy '36 Desoto

for a fast ride to the Union Hospital, the young girl
who one day will become my mother, climbs uninvited
and near unknown, into the front seat determined to ride along.

and this poem of their beginning is written
from the story as told to me in 1953 by Francis DiNucci DePola.


                                               Quequechan, Massachusetts