-in defense against a slanderous allegation-

no one holds credentials to justify assumptions 
that what I've documented happened otherwise, in that,

when once they may have mined the same set of jewels,
they've cultivated none of them.

along the way I've recorded their names, so that they

retain an invaluable place of historic standing

for being at the same place at the same time,–– but

none may now lay claim to being "counter-storytellers"

let alone be granted platforms to submit hearsay opinions
that anything of what I've documented happened otherwise.

I'm in good shape and because I'm in good shape

everyone else is in good shape.

-piece of Amy Winehouse-

when you step outside your skin

to look at the person you've made;

if you embrace the notions of those

dropped into the circle of your life

who want to sneak a dirty little peek;
if the music dies inside you
before it lingers outside you

and your legs drift weakly

and you can't keep up;

when none of them know you

but report that they know you

you'll likely retreat to darkness.

when the song is etched in your face

its colors running true in performance

and you're singing clearly

it’s working in your favor

and you’re less likely to kill yourself.

when the microphone

stands at the burn of your mouth

and what they see in front of them

is that which is sticking inside your throat

and it's late to recover clarity

and they tell you sternly

that you'd better go home

but you turn to sing where it's dark

and you've sung in that room

and you've come from that room

you'll likely die before morning.

 7/23/11

              

                             

-the man of certain means looks out the window-

on this morning, the 23rd of May

which will not return tomorrow

nor will it reemerge a year from now

wearing the false face of today, rather,

will be a new day, its own day, a day which will claim

its singular identity, I find myself

guzzling refreshing cranberry juice from the fridge

straight from the bottle's neck, pressing

the green button on the coffee maker, drizzling

multi-colored fish-shaped pellets

into the bowl reserved for Cleo the cat,

then opening the blinds to piercing sunlight.

eye-slapping lawns of green grass lay the grounds

and beyond the mossy stone wall a lawnmower rattles

the atmosphere, gasoline-powered, and the animals retreat.

on the road, the old jogger is hunch-backed, breathing with effort,

drenched in sweat but determined to his bones.

maybe he'll reach the southward banks
where the river ends and the bay begins, maybe not.

bearing witness to the the old-timer's run to the water

are me at the window, and one dead squirrel,

its petrified legs spread to paradise, nestled in its funeral
pyre of grass, road-side at the trunk of the sugar maple.

I should scoop it up as soon as the old jogger is out of sight,

and toss it into the tangle of wild-berry brush across the street,

but I don't, and I'm left to wonder what blessings
next year's 23rd of May will bring to a window

facing the only images it will ever know of its world.

Swansea

-Dream (a little dream) / once upon a time, a family-

Naomi is standing in the vale.

She reads from a book of poems

by Anna Journey who is not yet born:

"Dark Mouth like a Lullaby's"––

reciting to the child, the child beautified;

t-shirt screened in color:

"Chew Mail Pouch Tobacco" which

seems appropriate here.

Obligatory freight train rattles
westward in the near distance;

Boxcars labeled in precision print:
"Chessie Systems" –– glow cadmium

yellow upon metal-

ribbed fields of cobalt blue. 

Neville thinks they're in too deep

as if the Ohio is to pull them down.

Naomi hooks

the child below
the hollow pits.

Neville, hooks

the bend at his knees
and the child

sways as he would in a hammock latched
between the Appalachian hillsides nearing

the clapboard house in the lowlands.

                                                          

                                                                

                                         

  

-a diner, the weather, an old man and the young woman-

I’m encouraged this morning

by the way a warm, but heavy rain
falls upon the pavement of the parking lot.

when the downpour stops,

they arrive through the narrow entrance of the diner

sitting at the base of the Avenue of the Seven Hills.

an old man beats his soft fedora against the drenched

right leg of his baggy trousers then walks toward the two-tops.

he doesn't like the looks of me as I consider him from

my stool at the counter.

maybe he knows I write things down.

it was difficult to determine where the temporary

stain of rainwater stopped and the permanent stain

of perspiration began above the band of his aging fedora.

I make note of how the knees of his trousers are stretched

well out of proportion, befitting the look of trousers

among his age group.

he moves deliberately to the aisle and sits

at a two-top between two rows of open booths,––

one row to wall-side, the other row to weather.

the young woman enters, pausing at the door near the register.

she bends her head backward, airing-out her hair, rain-

droplets beneath the stark florescence glisten upon her face

as if stepping from the bath,–– the surge

of years between these two confront and challenge the diner's

once quiet mood, and so much of what is being done seems

better done when I'm around after the rain.

Al Mack's Diner / Fall River

-Tomorrow comes to William’s town-

They say one grows wiser

as one grows older.

So, I went in search of "They"

forgetting it was Wednesday

and the Barber Shop’s

closed on Wednesday.
I was hungry for a hotdog

and headed to "Nick's Coney Island,"

but after reading the message

scrawled on the blackboard

I decided to return on Thursday.

––Empty-handed, it's home again, but distressed

over not being wiser.

On Thursday afternoon

it's a short drive to “Nick’s Coney Island”

for my free hotdogs because on Wednesday,

scrawled on Nick’s blackboard

it said: “Free Hotdogs Tomorrow”!

Well, Thursday is tomorrow according to
any attentive man's calendar, so I'll go to Nick’s

after I go to the Barber Shop.

"Gimme three of them free hotdogs, Nick!”
I demanded, sporting a neat cropping dabbed in Witch Hazel.

Nick laughs. Nick laughs in my face.
Nick laughs and the hotdog eaters lined against the wall
siting in right-handed paddle-chairs, laugh along with Nick.
I consider some sort of litigation, but

Nick says: “Read the blackboard, kid”!

Blackboard says: “Free Hotdogs Tomorrow”!
I understand my foolishness and pay Nick in cash money
for three with the works which I eat on the run.

Home again and It seems that I am older and wiser
this Thursday than I was on Wednesday just like "They" say.

-fate of god-

cousin Albert on my mother’s side 

was kneecapped by the fate of god.

it then conned transparent tubes

of oxygen into Albert's nostrils, stripped
away the tough-guy double-ring corona

replacing it with a long strand of drool

to swing from his narrowing mouth,
sucked the once fierce muscle
dry as sawdust, reddened

the lids of his eyeballs, yellowed

the widening whites and then
for good measure with a sick
sense of application, humped his backbone.

god slapped cousin Albert around with a cold
determination for reasons unknown but to god.

"Ed’s Medical Supply" on Weybosset Street

strapped cousin Albert into a wheelchair for a test run,

Ed telling his sons: "boys, it's the best model in the house".
cousin Albert went along for the ride.

Celia, Al's wife of near 60 years,–– 
her beauty and youthful vivaciousness sapped,

soon to suffer a god’s kneecapping caper of her own,

once sent me soaring from the frantic interiors to the outer planets, and

these recollections came tumbling to mind between table-settings

of coffee and finger sandwiches (ham salad and chicken salad)
as they wheeled cousin Albert into the restaurant gathering
after the funeral services for Uncle Armand on my father’s side.

-another poem of ecstasy-

I can't say with conviction that the spider

is not a beautiful creature.

It’s both of us who live in the world,

me, upstairs in my house of wood, drywall and glass,
she, upon a strung web of silk in the basement where

the old treasures lie boxed

and draped under bedsheets to languish
in the dank purgatory between

usefulness and uselessness.

the spider’s web dances there

in the current of air

pulsating from the bulkhead

in the deepest recess of the corner

above the sump pump where it glistens

in a stream of sunlight.

when the sunlight passes,

the light of the Moon will slip
through the spaces at the bulkhead and linger.

this is the time when its silk

makes its move toward rare beauty.

sometimes, when I'm down there, I'll get close enough
that my breathing disturbs her web as she waits
unafraid upon the architecture of her making.

It's me alone who can tell her story. 

she has an instinct of her own,

an instinct to remain silent.

In time, she finds her way upward
into the living quarters of the house

leaving the web of neatly cocooned,

bloodless moths and flies behind,

crawling into openings and dark fissures 

devouring what she finds on the march

regardless of kinship, coming to rest upon
an interior wall near the ceiling over the hanging

photograph of my young father in 1942, posed for the camera,
looking sharp in bootcamp issue khakis which is where I’ll kill her.

-the old english teacher who had nothing to say-

old man J.J. Harrington struggled.

he tried to get through to us by reading weary
sentences from a page in a book.

he said the albatross hung around in the air.

he told us the boat

lay flat in the water.

he asked if any of us had taken the time

to look-up the definition of “eftsoons”

as he’d suggested the day before.
no one did.
ours, was a non-preparatory course of study.  

last night, all we thought about were our girlfriends,

driving around in cars, fooling around in the tunnel of love.

when the bell rang, old J.J. stood flat-footed,

his stubbled mouth agape as the lost

boys of the Tech Course Group hurried through the door

to Woodwork Shop with old man Marsden.

there, I grabbed a piece of pine from the barrel of woods

and lathed it down to a fine representation

of the Vanguard missile which blew-up

on its launching pad at Cape Canaveral in '57

embarrassing the Americans in the face of the Commies

and their fat, ugly rockets poised to blow us to smithereens.

In my wood-fashioned Vanguard, I saw the liftoff,

the flames of ignition, the power of its mighty thrusters, then

a few feet up and the sickening yaw, like a brilliant

pendulum, one sickening shift to port,

one sickening shift to starboard, a realtime

slow motion dance of death on television, the beautiful,

sleek, bullet-shaped Vanguard, hung-still

over its cloud of smoke, of flame and fuel,
its nosecone tipping over in the last gesture of life, 

the Vanguard sinking to the molten pad of its birth,

disintegrating into its own womb of fire.

that, J.J., is what I saw in the little stick of pine,

the wood still hot from the spinning lathe in the palms of my hands.
all we needed was a little imagery, J.J.––

I coulda been a poet, J.J.—

I coulda been somebody.

  

-never got to see the guy-

I didn’t know much about Ralph Fasanella.

I’d seen art book reproductions

of his city paintings and liked them, in part because

the romance reminded me of my smaller city, each rising

along the banks of their rivers with an expression

of the expansiveness in the life going on inside and outside

the compressed architecture of both.

a friend, who knew more about his pictures than I did
informed me a number of years after our time in Art School, 
that Fasanella was giving a lecture in Boston and he said: “Let’s go”.

so we drove the 50 miles north on 95 to Boston to hear Fasanella.

when we arrived at the site of the lecture, we found

the building locked and dark with a hand-written
notice of cancelation taped unapologetically to the door.

no lecture.

no Ralph Fasanella.

no discussion between us over a late-
night supper at a Newbury Street cafe,
a quiet curbside table is what I romanticized 
as we locked-in to what it is he sees in the structure

of his landscape and what it is I see in the structure of my own,––

long into night, looking inward at the banks of the rivers.

1973.
1974?

                                                                       

                                                                       

                                                                     

-seeking answers to unanswerable questions -

the green-primed thru-truss bridge looks dreamlike in deep twilight,

and there's always the river to consider.

this is the time when the city on the far edge of the Taunton

displays itself in a series of semi-precious gems of incandescence

set in relief upon the sweeping hillside.

on this edge of the river sits

a variety store a quarter mile down the road,

and I'm looking forward to cooking a fried egg,

sunny side-up for tomorrow's mid-morning breakfast.

the car’s in the driveway.

(last night I noticed a slight tingling sensation

running through my arms to my fingertips and

questioned who would know the meaning of such things.

I should mention it at the required wellness appointment.)

in a while, I'll drive to "Jayne's Country Store"

for a visual assessment of the bread and eggs I'll need,
confident in favorable conclusions.

"I'll take this loaf of bread and this carton of eggs."

now that it comes to mind, I believe I'll enjoy two

eggs, sunny side-up for tomorrow's mid-morning breakfast.

the car's in the driveway.

who am I kidding.

I'm not going anywhere, tonight or tomorrow.

I don't know why the doldrums surround me on occasion, but

I hear-tell that certain animals actually doze-off

standing on their feet although it takes the four legs of them to do it,

and in due time I'll check to see if the car's still in the driveway.

Swansea, 2014