-saga of the lonely young woman-

1.

at the bar with the songbird,

the band’s jazzy frontgirl, personal healer

to the emotionally needy,–– overlooking

Narraganset Bay, the mouth to Rhode Island Sound,

overcast atmosphere, but bright nonetheless.

It's cool, for May 30th.

menus at the ready, the house

black angus burger for me,

Bahamian conch salad for her.

I’ll have a "Narraganset" Lager Beer.

(when in Rome..)

I ask for a pilsner glass.

she wants a "Bloody Mary" with "Ketel One".

our bartender’s pleasant without being outrageous.

there’s a young woman sitting alone at the far end of the bar.

she’s a red wine drinker.

she appears to be in some sort of distress.

her secret love is our bartender’s sidekick

chatting at his station.

she’s smiling and talkative in his presence.

he’s charming without being totally engaged and she seems

to sense this in his attitude when he walks away.

he addresses customers with a helpful: “can I get you another drink”?

he asks her the same question with the same inflection

and continues with his tending of others.

2.

the bartenders meet near the middle, near the equator,

for kindred repartee, closer to our end of the planet.

she’s on her second glass which is now, nearly empty.

she’s pathetic, lonely, forlorn and sweeps the last red

flow of wine to her lips and is done.

he rings-up the tab, placing it in a snazzy, leathery ledger

and she pays him with a scroll of its pen and leaves the bar.

he wipes her away with a brisk, damp cloth.

3.

we’ll talk about seagulls now, hovering out there for a morsel of bread,

a french fry spotted on the wing,–– a human offering of recognition.

                                                 

-the pantry-

the pantry made a more practical case for being

than the formal parlor, which was separated
from the crazy living room by a lintel arch.

one small window at the end of the pantry's
narrow interior was all that was needed.

the parlor was sterile in comparison,
cloaked in heavy plastic and closed-off 
to commoners by a proximity zone
as if an investigation was in progress.

the pantry had petrified
raspberry jam speckled on its walls.

It had the little aluminum strip running along the edge

of its counter like a belt holding the green formica in place.

it was in the pantry where the occasional mouse
would be found with its head caught in a trap

behind the little latched door under the counter

where the cleaning poisons were stored.

my young mother would lament: “poor little thing” as my father

lifted the tension of the fatal bar sprung at its neck,

pinch-gripping the animal by the end of its worm-of-a-tail,
tossing it into the backyard for the cat's afternoon performance

attended by me, the kid upstairs and usually a cousin or two.

   

                                                                      Quequechan

              

-topical, tactical, popsicle, bicycle-

of the earliest of friends:
the flavor of choice was cherry red.

(color of my Schwinn) ––

we'd suck the sweet syrup out from the convex turn,

the edge of its sides to a glitter of ice.

Inside the corner stores, the freezers, chest-high,
smoked with cold at the lift of their lids.
curbstones were best to split the beauties at their spines.

we're close to home at this stage of life;
the ballpark's active, the bakeries are warmly scented, the red-
bricked mill-stacks billow smoke above hard labor, the calm 
reflections of freshwater ponds and the Moon-geared
mechanics of saltwater tides, link to neighborhood, whose
poetry lay waiting for its evolution.

call me a weak interpreter of the virtuosity expected of such an endeavor
and I'll tell you that it's strong enough; that I came here, as they have,
documentation in hand, procured at the altar of a place on the hillside
at the banks of the river that you, too, are well aware of.


Quequechan / mid 20th century

-the  "Monday morning again"  blues-

from the archives:

keeping-up with accounts

of terrorist attacks

is as easy as refreshing the digital

pages of the New York Times;

one tap of the index finger and the "update" is in.

I'm well informed.

It’s reported at length, that

at the nightclub massacre in Istanbul, the count

has climbed to 39 dead from 17 only hours ago.

strange how the numbers roll from the press.

strange how they roll from the poet’s tongue.

who's in charge of this solemn arithmetic?

how’d he get that job?

"he knows somebody downtown".

It’s always been that way.

the cherry jobs go to the guys

who know somebody downtown.

my father missed several opportunities

to climb the ladder in the liquor salesman’s
success story, the tragic opus ending with
the new guy who knew somebody upstairs.

the guy who knows somebody downtown

knows somebody upstairs.

39 and counting in Istanbul.

I hear-tell back in Nam, they counted

whole bodies with each scattered body part
found in the bush.–– a lurking,

black pajama-clad (one size fits all) Viet Cong,

(conical rice-hat-head-shade) tripped a claymore,

each body fragment found determined to be

a whole person, the arithmetic's summation scribbled

on the pages of Southeast Asia’s daily ledger.

"thirty-five kills".

(could be the scattered parts of one Viet Cong)

still,–– "thirty-five kills".

who was it got that counting job back in Nam?
who is it counting the dead in Istanbul?

                               

-origins in poetry for the less-than advanced reader-

1.

I'd learned early on

during my formal elementary education

that the planets (of which, glossy representations
were clothes-pinned above the blackboard
strung on a wire from the Sun, outward) were worthy
of a rare classroom attentiveness.

the planets held my interest by the gravity

of their mysterious individual behavior; that beyond the planets,

the universe was big, even back then; that my standing between

the Narrows of the Watuppa, and the ocean-seeking Taunton,

wasn't the center of everything;

that if I traveled beyond the southend of town by car or bike,

passing the "Dairy Queen" and "Ponta Delgada Drive-In,"

I wouldn’t fall from the Earth's edge into the abyss, with
who knows what

                          waiting

                                    down 

                                            there.

at about the same time as this early understanding of

the solar system's globular cluster, and the vastness beyond,
I began to notice that Norena Ferreira’s legs

were more fascinating than I had previously realized,
an observation belonging less to any discussion

of my formal elementary education, than to a discussion

of my informal elementary education.

2.

these recollections came to me after a reading of Schubert’s 8th in 2009.