-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.