-my female black-haired cat and the big calico male cat across the street-

my cat is fast as lightning and as slick as a lubricated piston-rod.

she’s sleek, like a strand of licorice and nearly as pliable.

she crouches and pounces like a panther; like the best of them in Burma,
or Nepal, or wherever else they're found, whenever objects roll across her path.

when she was a kitten, the sight of a full-grown crow, cawing

on the deck’s railing outside, sent her running for cover, confusing

her instinctive sensibilities.

but that aside, she’s grown to be a fierce protector
of her standing inside the house against moths and flies on the wing.

the big calico male across the street is designated

by his human family as an “outdoor cat,” meaning

he goes outside everyday to check-up on things then saunters
inside where floor-bowls sit filled to their brims and I assume,
where tasty snacks are occasionally presented as reward
for a job well done.

the big calico's "outdoor cat" designation also distinguishes him
from the scarred, battered ruffians who roam out there for a living.

whenever my cat sees the handsome calico from the window,
trotting around his property across the street like king shit,

her head lifts high, her ears become vertical spearheads, and her tail

expands to resemble one of those bushy-headed, rainbow-colored dusting tools,

but in her case, pitch-tar black, which unfortunately is not a color
available to her in the "Catalog of Bushy-headed Dusting Tools."

-as they once played those smoke-filled rooms-

the snare-drummer's

swishing brush strokes caress the sultry
front-girl, mouth to the mic who drops
a jazzy sigh with every phrase.

clinking cocktail glasses add to the atmosphere.

tumbling ice cubes accompany pizzicato bass,
muted alto sax,–– the piano, lightly keyed.

tonight, it's the “Hank Rossi Quartet”

featuring the “Vocal Artistry of Deborah Pinía"

a three-night stand at the “Seven Seas Club”

in Newport, Rhode Island, sometime in the low-
middle dates of the early 1950s.

the room's hot, misty and red-tinctured,–– like being inside

an inflated parade balloon.

smooth licks all night long;

not one forte.

last notes linger through an atmosphere
of hanging clouds of exhaled smoke

with never a raucous ovation, because
at the "Seven Seas", that would be perceived as rude.

   

-Hallmark-

Chasidor Leo handed me a revolver.

“Take this to your old man” said Chasidor Leo

Standing twelve feet tall behind the imposing

Counter of wood and glass displaying his dry goods.

"Watch-out"! warned Chasidor Leo. "It’s cocked and loaded”.

It was me, not Chasidor Leo,
Who handed the weapon to the great, road-tested salesman.

                    I watched him sitting
                    at the kitchen table
                    from the linoleum floor
                    pattern-swirled in marbleized green
                    beneath the circulating fan
                    hanging from the ceiling dropped in cork.


It was there he fired-up the last of 20 rounds placed into his mouth.

Chasidor Leo, proprietor of canned goods and sliced meats, is to be notified herein:

"Chaz, it was an easy shot, but a lucky strike".

Stella: / the early years

Stella was the youngest of four children

born to the powerful Furguelle family,
landlords of our tenement, the great and frantic

tenement designated by the City of Fall River

as 1017 Bedford Street, first floor, heat and hot water included.

The elder Furguelle's took the lead in proposing
and planning future church functions;

bizarres, festas, bake-sales, installations, honorariums,

and of course as prime movers to Columbus Day festivities.   

They were also active at neighborhood weddings and funerals,

clearly recognizable as front-runners, whether standing,

dancing, sitting, or lying in repose.

We remember Stella, namesake to the stalwart matriarch, as a shy,

retiring young woman, unremarkable, and as someone simply being there.

-Shapiro's probability-

an appreciation of the film: "Stalag 17"

intro:

––Something's permeating the air of the Stalag.

Filtering through its frigid barracks the scent stirs,  

comically resolved through the washtub's tepid

potato soup-du-jour to scrub its socks. 

mud's requiem:

––The flatbed hauls Manfredi and Johnson

to closure from their brief respite.
Manfredi and Johnson are dropped to the mud's exhibition
with no such creative resolution as had the potato soup. 

Here at the Stalag it's all in the mud. 

So where's the relief from such an incident if not at the track?   

at the snack-bar:

––1. You can't get a decent mint julep anywhere in the joint.

2. Nearing post time. 

3. Place your bets in cigarettes.

4. NO BUTTS.

 scherzo:

––Animal's deliberation:

Schnicklefritz has Animal's instinctive cover.

But this rat's a long-shot of a horse at ten to one.

Maybe he's a mudder.

But this track's cardboard dry.

Animal's reluctant, but bet's-up by Shapiro's prodding

to the fleet-footed Equipoise.

and they're off and running.

a rondo of sorts:

––It's a fast track

and Equipoise has Animal's ten-smoke bet on its nose.

But Equipoise

ignores the circle of the track to track the circle of its tail.

Somebody should cut it off with a carving knife!

What the hell kind of horse is this rat, anyway?

It's Schnicklefritz by five lengths.

At ten smokes to one.

opera comique:

––Shapiro laments on clocking Equipoise that very morning.

Animal: "YOU clocked him?!   Why.. don't.. I.. clock.. you?"

and under the dark of the mud-in-the-moon

the Stalag's flatbed is emptied of it's cargo, the once

Manfredi and Johnson.

Fini

                                 

                        

                         

                          

                       

                         

                        

-sticking around for the sake of the kids and other inconveniences-

Overture:

It's another of those eventful evenings.
the orchestra opens to brooding melody.

Scene 1.
the night before:

he tosses the 24 carat gold cufflinks into the shallow
alabaster bowl sitting on the dresser with a muffled clink;
she releases the clasp of the Mikimoto strands from behind her neck,
drapes them into the velvet-lined repository.

dinner plans, for whatever reason, are set aside for the sake of discussion;
a discussion as formal and definitive as the articles of surrender.

Scene 2.
the previous week:

his dentist prepared the inoculation

in order to “numb the area”.

Scene 3.
the eventful evening:

an accident ahead.

the cop waves him through.

a late model red Cadillac Escalade's involved.

his wife drives a late model red Cadillac Escalade.

pausing his brain from rehearsing

the confession regarding his infidelity,
he proceeds with conflicted caution.
it’s not her Cadillac Escalade.

Scene 4.

his infidelity is best confessed after he's digested a late supper at home.

he remembers his phone-call to her as he gathered himself
to leave the Harvard Club for the night.–– she said:
"I don't know, dear. Anthony's preparing Duck a l'Orange or something".
                                                                                  

Curtain.

the smoker and me and L.S./M.F.T.

of my father, assassinated by the American Tobacco Co. on 6/1/1982

          he said:  "go get me some Luckies"!

you'll find them resting at Chasidor Leo’s Variety Store

open for business across the street from the backstop.

      

the soft pack will hint of its sweet aroma in fine tobacco.

homeward, you'll raise the pack to your early nostrils
enjoying a whiff as I once did.

          he said:  "go get me some Luckies"!

the pack is seductive; its cellophane wrap
seems glazed in amber beneath the streetlight's incandescence.

It's the ripcord which sets the beauties free.
          he said:  "I will teach you".

igniting the earthy strands of tobacco, the dry
smoke corkscrews downward for the want of a lung to keep it company.

go get me some Luckies!

          he said:  "go get me some Luckies".

he said: "William, listen to your mother".
          she said:  "go get your father some Luckies".

        

-my visit to “PennSound”-

"the soul selects her own society"

my visit to “PennSound”

finds a large collection of audio poetry, offering poets

reading from their own works as well as offerings

of poets now dead or somehow incapacitated.

I scrolled through the names in search of "Emily Dickinson"
fantasizing along the way, that maybe a previously unknown,
scratchy, metallic machine of sorts had been unearthed
on the garden grounds where the fig tree stands at Amherst,

presenting an early experimental waxed recording of Emily

reading her poems, scrap after scrap unbound ––

the delicate contralto barely audible beyond the surface hiss,

the graciousness in her diction, the implement close to her mouth,

her living breath carrying with it the warmth of her isolation,

the understandable quaver while reading into the inconceivable contraption.

but because I can't have all that I long for, I settled into the voice of

Naomi Replansky, born in the Bronx, sounds like the Bronx even now,

righteously reading: "The Soul Selects Her Own Society" in place of the voice

of Emily Dickinson.

-look at me-

look at me.

It’s what I want.
It's what most of us want,
lest we take our goods
to unpopulated rooms
leaving them to themselves.

I’ve been released,–– the official papers
drawn and signed by the principals. 

I’m now within reach of a permanent territory,
a geography of my choosing at the junction of two rivers.

I've learned a lot from the goings on of my early life.

polio once trotted by me without so much as a glance.

I wanted to "look"––

now I want to "talk".
the transition was remarkably easy,
pulled-off without a hitch.

so, as it is now, not much distracts me––

not television nor bombings nor cellphones

clinking J.S.Bach jingles searching for me.

searching “FOR ME"!

look at me.

who knows what's left to be resolved?

and who knows?–– eventually,
we all just might come our senses.

-he sings the stuff of life. what do I sing?-

of Jimmy Phealan’s march to the sea.

I hear Jimmy Phealan singing Shakespeare. 

I sing of traversing 
Hi-Low-Jack-and Game at the chain-
linked fence where the right field homers fly.

how does Jimmy Phealan hear me when I sing?

with inventions and nightmares?

through one big eye in the middle of
an inverted pear-shaped head?

Jimmy Phealan thinks I’m bald with long,
skinny fingers that cannot possibly work.

(can’t open a jar of syrupy jelly,––

fingers no good for nothin’)

but I have powers, he might imagine and

maybe I read minds, he might assume
and it’s his mind I’ll read, so Jimmy fear's

and I'm afraid of what I can do with the powers
of the extra terrestrial he's made of me.

in the afternoon of morning I’ll visit others of Jimmy's kind

at Institution 10, ward 17, follow the chalk-white stripe,

straight to the sewer who eats foul balls and sing of eternal
hands heavy with trumps.
now, that's the way in. but this is the way out.

-Running around like a mob of lunatics-

This happened at the Sons of Italy Hall reception
for the “Installation of Officers” in or about 1952.

Whole families attended.

Gerry Lombarstini:  Treasurer.

Charlie Mangino:  Under Secretary for Catholic Affairs.

Delores D'Adamo Mangino:  Anti-Mussolini Women’s Auxiliary. (AMWA)

Ray Patrucci:  Event Floor Procedures and Emergency Evacuations.

True to form, the kids are running around like a mob of lunatics.
But unlike adults who mostly run in tightly-formed groupings,
usually away from something, generally, for their lives, these kids
weave chaotically between one another testing even the most
tolerant of adventurous parents in attendance.

I see the younger ones are having a hard time keeping up.

They seem to reason there should be somewhere to go,

a pre-determined destination to be occupied by a lucky winner.

So they find some isolated corners, hesitate, look around, then resume the run.

It’s rumored that Delores D'Adamo Mangino’s grandmother, Ida D'Adamo,
village born, was the first woman to be photographed whacking the inverted
Benito with a broom's-head, validating her granddaughter's installation to the AMWA.         

1951, 1953? 1952.

   

-in recognition of the birthdate of e.e. cummings-

but 1st,–– a reading of Sharon Olds' "Primitive".

(she knows moo shu pork when she smells it..)

 

2nd:

i’m reminded that the last years of e.e.'s life

were the happiest.–– or so i've read, and when

informed of such things i have a tendency to believe them.

first though, it's Sharon Olds feasting on tantalizing moo shu pork

where from the table she announces sex with her man–– with her eyes!

3rd:

so, it's the birthdate of e.e. cummings, a poet,

the understanding of whom I'm as ignorant as a plank,

save for the tonality with which his word-fall flows at my eyes.

big finish:

along with the complexities of a red-shifting universe,–– far from

the flakey-skinned heels of God, drunk on the vintage he's trampled out,

down to the last hydrogen molecule's to-do list,–– I here offer to you

what i've come up with on this, the 14th day of October.

-of God, the universe, an obituary and Albert Ragonessi, that bum-

I’m standing at the edge of reason;

the precipice of one generation, where

the salt of life is to be recorded.

so the fragments are gathered, then

cobbled to read as in storytelling, enhanced

through the glazing of commonness,

that which appears to the critical-eye, unexceptional.

a scamper down the first base line, a dark confessional,
the first explorations, a brush of white cotton, a grapevine,

a junkyard, a death here and there, a death heard ‘round the world.

so what am I doing here, staring into
the eyes of souls watered by the piss of God?

( I was safe at second and everybody knows it,

sliding under Petrillo’s ball-filled glove as if I was greased.

Ragonessi, that bum;

he called me out with his beady little eyes, dark
and lidded and as fatal as Venus fly traps! )

so where am I taking this bauble of my time;
this ancient ornament?

to whom is that catch in left field bequeathed?

what will be done of the warm invitations I've long ignored?

it’s funny and tragic.

it’s unique and largely unknown.

it’s rich and it's formidable.

you should write this down:

that at the least, I've taken the measure
of that which would be forgotten and placed it upon the table.

-from the policy forms-

according to the findings of

several skewed methodologies,

my son is now near half my age, and

named as beneficiary to close-out the long form

of a tedious life insurance policy,

the bottom three lines left open

to accommodate clumsy explanations.

that mystifying bauble of 1976, swaddled in his young

mother’s arms; the raspy-throated struggle in his cry, the sudden,

angular movements of his head, capped in white cotton, the curious

gaze of his earliest eyes before the smile's development, the exaggerated

stress of his unapologetic yawn exposing the moist glazing

swept across his infant gums..

now the child's become a man who calls on occasion from the distant

edge of the continent's beam to ask: "how you doin'?"–– confident,

sincere, smart, and now it seems, half my age more or less,

leaving me to double-check the document in a cold sweat,

leafing through the long form, agonizing over my residence

from one place to the other place, to the place before that,

all to bequeath to him a sum of money when I croak.

well, maybe a few bucks more or less.

-That which is beyond my grasp and other misadventures-

As I looked at the photograph in the morning’s paper

of Stockholm's “Prize Committee” I was again instructed as to
how far removed I live from their world.

I'd look like a tuxedo'd tube of Grumbacher "flesh" in Stockholm.

I also realized how far removed I live from the world

of the Poet selected by the “Prize Committee”. After all,

what the hell do I know about the "Sombreros of Autumn"?

Years earlier, Priest spoke to me

about my “altar boy” application presented to him

by my mother my father my grandfather and my grandmother.

The sacristy smelled like a cheap port; a little acidic

approaching the acid scent of vinegar with a touch,

only a touch, mind you, of the grape.

Am I recalling my grandfather’s deep purple-stained,

everyday, every-single-day cardigan?

I’m also sure that my weekly attendance

at catechism classes worked in my favor.

The constant bops to the back of my head with a flexible bible

were delivered by a Priest now dead, so

new Priest was unaware of my transgressions.

His baritone was measured.

His breath smelled like the sacristy’s atmosphere.

He asked if I knew the rosary.

I told him: no, but I had family connections.

He asked me if I was aware that "self abuse
was a sin against God".

I wanted to ask: “Where in hell did that come from"?

But sad-faced I answered: “Probably, Father".

I was shown my surplice and cassock

hanging in a cedar closet, was told it was my responsibility
to keep it clean (“Clean from what, Father”?)

and was given the schedule of pre,"real altar boy" classes to attend.
New Priest blessed me with a near perfect “sign of the cross”––

that limp-wrist, nonchalant, two-fingered zigzag and sent me on my way 

to join my friends for a sneaky smoke in the dugout at the first base line.

Back in Stockholm, I think those who selected the "Prize Committee" got it right.

so, amen again and amen.