-on this Friday morning-

to set-up his poem: "The Poet's Obligation,"

Neruda writes:

“To whoever is not listening to the sea

this Friday morning..”

–– and so I began my intrusion into this passage.

I stretched my skinny arm as far

as bone could take it to the air above my head,

waving the palm of my hand like a frantic schoolboy

who thought he knew the answer, straining from

the depth of my throat, all in seeking the great Chilean

poet's recognition.— well, it seemed that way.

––– so this Friday morning finds my head

with its ear toward the sea, clenching sand with my curling

toes gripping like the fists of a tortured man, approaching 

the storm-fences holding fast in the last stand against the wind.

––– and in the here-and-now from my hometown,

ringing with the echoes of spindles and shuttles, and the lost
heat of its once billowing stacks above the weaving looms

where ran an ocean of cloth,––
I'll listen to the sea, recalling my baptism when

Neruda whispered the thought of something, asking:

“What is water like in the stars?”—

and I said to myself:

who in this world would ask such a question? 

                                                       

-Tap dancer-

1.
The anticipation was nearly overpowering as a kid,
all of ten years, mesmerized by my Uncle Frank
laboring in front of the massive polishing lathe
behind the counter inside his cluttered cobbler shop.

When he shut it down, the whirring shaft of the lathe
slowed smoothly to a stop behind him.–– And then,

he finalized the task-at-hand by tacking metal "clickers"
to the outer edge of each new heel of my old Sunday shoes.

The quarter-moon-shaped clickers were strategically placed,

calculated by the wear-patterns of both the old discarded heels.

Frank was well aware of his culpability in acquiescing to my request,
but tacked the parentally outlawed clickers down, anyway.

2.
During that time and concurrently, it was by the patent-leather tap shoes
worn by my sister, three years my elder, that I first became aware
of the grater dynamic in the sounds of shoes clicking upon a hard surface;

her dancing feet on a fast-track through endless hours of deliberate study,

tapping over the kitchen’s worn linoleum after supper and into the wacky
situation comedies of early nighttime television, broadcast live into the parlors
of the neighborhood's hard-earned tranquility.

Hers, was the burgeoning of genius. 

3.
As for me, the clicking of my heels was no more than a cool,

short-lived sound repeating itself across the sidewalks of Bedford Street

or the narrow corridors of the Hugo A. Dubuque School, where

roaming these and other walking-distance locations
I might have made a name for myself as something of a local curiosity.

Quequechan

-René, Bernadette, and the Muscleman-

René Beauchemin is a wimp.

at the beach, the local muscleman

kicks sand in his face humiliating Bernadette

who romantically begins to consider the muscleman.

she’s squeezing the bicep of his right arm

even though the muscleman's left-handed.

René’s left-handed, too,
not that it matters in situations like this.

René was an ink-smudger in grade school.

(his left hand is sliding through the wetness of ink,
left to right on the cursive page of his letters.
old, and hard-hearted, Miss Sykes grades him as: "Failed"
in the category of: "Neatness")

at home, René is angered by his frailties

and kicks a wastepaper basket causing a trashy mess.

later, René works-out and builds muscle-mass.

he likes what he sees in the mirror.

back on the beach, René socks the muscleman

square on the jaw to win back the heart of Bernadette.

Bernadette squeals: “My Hero” and

excites René with a wet kiss to his mouth.

back home, Bernadette rewards René with the blowjob of his life.

-through the portal open to subscribers-

9/24/18

1.
––I'll lift the lid to expose the crazed eyesight of the world.

a column in the "New York Times" on-line reads:

“Pigs All the Way Down” by Michelle Goldberg.

I'll read Michelle over a bounty of blueberry muffins

and two cups of strong coffee.
I'll tune-in to 24 hour news on cable TV, too.
sometimes I prefer the madness to come at me on a loop.

2.

––history says: no one I knew ever tossed a rolled and tucked newspaper

over a white picket fence into the manicured front yard of a split-
level ranch from the saddle of a bike.

three tenements, four, or six tenements, we trudged up the stairs

plopping the papers down at the base of the doors.
Sunday deliveries were burdensome and sometimes
after the plopping, the inner folds spilled from the outer fold
holding the headlines, fanning-out across the entry, titillating
the non-subscribing third floor residents on their way down.
there are dogs barking behind the doors of the entries.

everybody’s shouting in there.
the television sets are tuned to amphitheater mode.
If "Little Richard" is pounding a piano, those of my kind are inside.

(the Mezzotesta clan seem to have a live chicken in the kitchen.)
the entries stink of tobacco, fatty italian cold-cuts, stinging tomato sauce..

each has its own pinch of stench; some with a little more of one stench,

others with a little more of whatever the other stench is.

the tenements were the incubators of our time.

3.

––meanwhile, Goldberg’s column is a good read as always

and the early blueberry muffins are sweetly moist and

the coffee's first rate.

as to the here and now, I don’t schedule my day

around calendar appointments, but
I know it's the way of the world nowadays.
so I'll stay put.
the way I see it, it's the world's loss, not mine.

              -the "WOP"-

               1958

               and during a cold winter morning

               the "WOP" drives his old “Brown”

               tractor trailer from a loading dock in Fall River

               toward a destination set deeply

               into the State of New Hampshire.

               I ride-along on the run.

               he’s hauling semi-perishables for a Company

               originating somewhere in North Carolina.

               the old “Brown” diesel rattles

               and smokes through its single stack.
               the cab is cold and noisy

               and in time, its speed concerns me.

               Interlude:

               Priest said: "the right hand of God is placed there
               to traverse the four destinations of the sign-of-the-cross".

               (the "Holy Ghost" occupies two of the four destinations)

               "O Christopher,
               carry me safely across the fast-track
               of sheetmetal, semi-perishables and spent gasoline"!

               a windblown snow slashes
               across the windshield like a thousand sabers.

               the observant WOP

               tells me: “don’t be afraid”

               and cranks-down the gears of the heavy-

               laden Brown through a treacherous slope.

               there’s a "sleeper" behind us which stinks.

               we’ll stop along the way, but

               everything’s ordered to travel on the quick-step

               when hauling semi-perishables into New Hampshire.

               

               all night long the great Brown

               runs its cargo northward into the State
               where the "Old Man of the Mountain" reigns high
               above the craggy landscape,–– onward! north by northwest,

               well beyond the northernmost borderline of Massachusetts.  

               time is not on my side.

               

               over the fast lane of the run, the WOP
               leans-in and swings his left arm high
               above his head like a Whirling Dervish

               indicating to oncoming truckers
               that the southbound lane ahead is free of cops.
               this is the unwritten poetry of the trucker on the open road.

               I long for sleep, but I won’t crawl into
               the sleeper's bed.

               the WOP’s eyes are heavy-lidded.
               onward, the Brown! onward!
               damn this madness!

               close enough now to see

               the great White Mountains peek

               through a deepening twilight.

               we’ll sleep at a roadside motel,

               two beds and a pretty good TV set

               but only after the shuttering Brown

               backs into the narrow space of a loading dock
               at sunup on the third day somewhere in the granite-
               headed State of New Hampshire.

               'twas "Bay 13" as best I remember.

-knowing just enough about art to be unhappy-

where is the end of the line.

what if we pull back from its width.

what if we piss our pants in the struggle.

should we pull back anyway or say

fuck it.

is the line like the un-line of fickle Renoir

who couldn’t decide where the edge should be
of anything?

christ, how could he manipulate a sealed
tin of french sardines?

Ingres knew something about

what the line can do.

that left arm of Madame Destouches!

that’s a hell of an arm.

it goes on and on, elongated with greater
romance than Plastic Man’s arm!

Madame's left arm pulls your eye clockwise
through a slow-moving oblong to the sitting knee
and the oblong continues clockwise to the right arm
resting upon the backrest of a nicely upholstered sofa, but
with more abstract tension than a taut, hanging man’s rope.

it's enough to drive a non-practitioner crazy.

that said, I like looking at Ingres
and there are books on the shelf so I can turn the pages
to the pictures I want to see whenever I want to see them.

but that doesn’t mean I’ll be happy about it.

  

-It’s that goddamn God again-

Requiem for Rose Giambastini

the walnuts are falling.

they drop from a plastered ceiling.

but how?

It hurts when a walnut bops you on the head––

when another stings the back of the neck

as you bend to grab the walnut (that bopped you
on the head in the first place) from the green

linoleum.

these nuts have hard

shells.
one way is to split them open by hammer on the tabletop.

best to cover them first.

those old nutcrackers weren’t meant to crack walnuts.

they don’t work the way you want them to work.

they open just wide enough to fit the walnut between the handles, but
too wide for the palm of your early hand to see the process through.

the walnut slides around haphazardly within the nutcracker.

It takes a sure hand and bothersome placement.

you've got to find the equator–– presume the other side,

                                                    the dark side of the walnut,

goes ‘round to meet the teeth of the cracker's lower jaw

and when the time comes to realize where the falling 

walnuts come from; from what? the hand of God?

a paradise of water-stained plaster and a chorus of disturbing
laughter from those in attendance standing in the hallway?  no. but––

It doesn’t matter. I’ll hold to the imagery

and when my maternal grandmother dies, the walnuts,

if they fall at all, fall far from the realm of enchantment, but––

with enough lingering interest in the charm of the thing to tell yet another story.

1017 / 1948 (?)

-aunt Eva-

when I first wrote of Eva  (spun-

blonde beehive hairdo, spray-netted to stay put,
muscular calves, fleshy thighs and

peek-a-boo nylon

stockings, sitting on the couch

in front of the television)  it was due to remembrances

of recurring visits to my father’s house

and Eva,

married with young kids of her own

is considered now, to having then been on the young-

side of her late mid-thirties.

but the reported hemline shortness of her dress

is misleading.

it just appeared to be short because

she’s tall and weighs-in on the heavy side,
more Italian than French and I doubt
the hemline was considered inappropriate when

she bought the dress,

probably at the storied "Cherry & Webb"
Department Store on South Main where

my young mother

(and plenty of other mothers
far above her financial station)

shopped for special occasions closing-in from the near horizon;

(expensive)
apparel, neatly folded within perfumed boxes to carry home and save
with descriptive "Cherry & Webb" logo printing on their lids

and this, before (it could be argued, early proposals
in experimental gentrification) the first Shopping Mall appeared,

constructed on a large parcel of land on the wooded frontier)  but
in the here and now of this story, there sits Eva again,
near fully-clothed sitting on the couch in my father's house and

although parallel descriptions as those herein can be said of Aunt Alma,

this exposé continues about Eva, and this selected pinprick of her time on this Earth.

1017 / 1953 (?)

          -a consequence in raspberry jam-

          introducing my two-and-a-half year old son

          snacking after his feeding of nutritious food

          prepared by the hands of his mother.
          I've provided the snacks and now his hands, his face

          and hair are coated with sticky raspberry jam

          and what appears to be cake frosting, although

          no trace of cake can be found anywhere in the house.

          his mother is in another room and seems content
          to have left him in my care.

          my immediate concern is to find a way

          to wrestle him from his passion for sugar and clean him up
          before I'm nabbed in the act by his anti-sugar campaigning mother.

          I’m intrigued by his singular dismissiveness at being
          such a sticky mess.

          It would drive me crazy.

          everything he touches from his tray sticks to his hands.
          his hands stick together, finger to finger.

          his hair (Monica Vitti blonde) is matted in tufts of petrifying jam.

          I wouldn’t last a minute.
          I'm a plugged-nickel if his mother shows-up sugarless and scowling:
         “Damn It, Billy! Get Me A Facecloth With Warm Water"!

          Ohio

  A commissioned remembrance of "Fighting Al" Johnson, who,
  By way of the Kamikaze, went down to the sea on his ship.

By the Basin: The Northwestern Philippine Sea, April 16, 1945:

"Fighting Al" Johnson, chief machinist's-mate, was killed in action

Aboard the USS Hobson, DMS-26, a fast destroyer-sweeper in mid engagement,
Stove-in by a pilot crazed "Zeke"–– a heavy torpedo, one engine, two-manned

Meteorite of an aircraft during the bloody offshore Battle of Okinawa.
––Back home, his three year old son lived-on to become the sole proprietor of noteworthy

"Hartley's Original Pork Pies", South Main Street, skilled in fashioning,
For the workingman's palate, the best pork pies in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

––A patron, long of Hollywood and Broadway, USA,

Would one day come to proclaim: "I love these little things"!

That would be the once beguiling star of stage and screen, Patricia Neal.

––You'll remember, she's the gal who won the pathos of "Klaatu" (the Emissary) 

Utilizing her understated charms to coax him to submission in order to save the Earth's
Population from eradication by the scowling "Consortium Of Other Planets".

Klaatu will be back.

We didn’t change our ways.

The USS Hobson, DMS-26 afire and broken but afloat and under power,
Continued the fight of her life, holding her valiant dead within the burning of their stations,
Headlong into war's fierce commotion upon the black, Northwestern Philippine Sea.

Epilog:

"Fighting Al" Johnson, killed manning an ack-ack anti aircraft gun port amidships

Was buried at sea.

 Patricia Neal, star of stage and screen came to retire during a fight of her own, residing

On the Isle of Manhattan with occasional stopovers, southend of Fall River, for a dozen
Hartley's Original Pork Pies to travel on route to her beachfront home on the great sea island of

Martha’s Vineyard. The End.

This poem is commissioned by Fighting Al's only son, his namesake, Alan Johnson,
first guy on the corner to own his own car,–– a new, six-cylinder, four-door,
wedgewood-blue, 1959 Ford Custom 300, three gears forward on the column.

-airmail-

an introduction to a commission

so it’s been about two weeks since this happened:

I opened the side door to check on the day's mail.

It’s an old, small rectangular metal box with a lid

which has a narrow slot for the delivery of
the standard monthly bills, letters, greeting-cards and the like.

for larger items, the lid lifts to accommodate.

but the slot, like I’ve said, is narrow and the lid

opens, but slightly which causes problems when

fetching magazines, shopping-mall fliers, and the always

amusing shoutouts from local dealerships who

want to buy my car and can give me the deal of a lifetime.

as my hand digs in, my old friend Alan Johnson walks up the road.

––he knows I write things down.

he wants me to write something about his father

who died when Alan was three years old.

he’d like me to write something about a man

he never knew, nor loved and didn’t remember.
with my hand stuffed inside the narrow mailbox and nearly
held there without consent, I began the age-old struggle
confronting artists of all stations, which is
to proffer excuses, no matter how ridiculous, to avoid
committing to perform such requests.

"A band of criminals stole my MacBook and I can't do anything without my MacBook."

"For christsake, Alan. I’m going to croak soon enough myself"!

but then –– but then,

Alan (Chico) Johnson, once a young Bedford Street compatriot

through our time in the 50s into the early 60s tells me:

“He was killed aboard his Destroyer in World War Two by a Kamikaze”.

so the poem dedicated to "fighting" Al Johnson is nearing completion.

-the red-coated fox-

approaching the east-facing window into the backyard

at the tree-line, and there’s the red-coated fox.

the fox is on the trot from north to south

with the river behind her glistening under early skies,

her long, narrow snout erect and observant, occasionally

swiveling to starboard where I stand, with the black,

short-haired cat watching at the window.

the fox seems to enjoy the dew-cooled, green-coated
lay of the land and the river as I do on early morning walks,

but the fox is not alone in the community she's made for herself.

westward, the new neighbors have three adult Great Danes

with the population of joggers and small-dog walkers

of Gardners Neck Road protected from them by a hastily erected

pole-wired fence.

they’ll bark at anything or anyone crossing their line-of-sight, but

the Great Danes don't indicate an immediate physical threat to passersby.
they seem content to simply bark their preference to be recognized.
but no more than a nudge of their powerful heads would be enough to push

the wire-wall down.
In that event, it's every neighborhood Bichon Frise for itself.

across the road further westward, the young mother and female child
walk to the end of the driveway waiting for the school bus.

the Great Danes bark at the sight of them.

the young mother is intensely concerned, but

the female child is intensely curious.

stopping for the pick-up, the kids in the school bus are intrigued,

feeling safe within their cadmium yellow sheetmetal cocoon.

at the south-side window I can see them

pointing toward the barking Danes from the port-
side windows of the school-bus.

when the bus moves on, the female child goes with it.

the mother walks up the driveway and into her house.

the Great Danes shut-up during the brief pause at their fence.

(quickly, but with common sense interior caution)

I've moved to the east-facing window where

the fox has stopped trotting, sensing the sudden

silence of the Danes, but the cat's active, trying to

prioritize the views of the drama playing out before her:

red-coated fox to the east-northeast

or three Great Danes to the south by east

or mother and child to the south by west
or school bus by the nub of its hood due south

where intermittent cadmium yellow lines assist

on a heading toward the Bay.