Poetry
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Poems
Attica 1977
Winter Solstice 2005 (the new war dead)
American Cemetery at Nettuno
Pylon
Station to station
Portrait of my father with Caravaggio’s hands
A skull
my friend says, it’s like
you’re inside a skull.
And then I feel the pressure
the way the ceilings push down.
I hunch up,
tuck my neck into my shirt.
The deeper I go in
the more the tunnel narrows.
The first time I didn’t know
the soft yellow patches
in the wooden beams
filled with plastic wood
were bullet holes.
Yeah, Mustafa said,
you need to look up,
see what’s around you.
*
Near Christmas, the class was small
two men were locked down, and the others
off the count—too late to make it,
so only three men showed, Shea
laughed, pulled out
a thin jailhouse joint.
We smoked it there,
watched the snow fall in the yards,
outside.
And then we read
to each other, the words
spinning out.
*
On my way home
I skidded in the drifts—
first left, then right
until the tires grabbed.
I thought of the floodlights
and the snow-filled yards, tiny barred windows
aglow in the storm.
I thought of the troopers in the rain
that September day, the rifles, shotguns,
poking out above the walls, waiting.
I think of the Convent of the Capuchins
in Rome,
where the monks led us
into their cavern of 4000 skulls,
intricate figure re-shaped from the fallen,
a grinning dance of death.
Winter Solstice 2005 (the new war dead)
A flock of starlings
scuttle on the rooftop
splash in rainwater pools.
The last leaves hang in the branches
of the red maple tree.
Look, my friend says
there’s a kind of dark
all around us,
you have to get used to it.
Bricker’s neighbor shot himself in his garage,
the summer I turned eleven.
A pistol, Tommy said, Smith & Wesson .38.
Once in winter I cut the yards,
saw him bent over his workbench–
the trouble light overhead,
cigarette smoke.
He saw my shadow and looked up.
He drove an old gray Plymouth,
a car with a single headlight like a beak.
Birdman of Church Street, we called him.
Now December rain keeps falling
and the news slips out.
The dead come back.
A line of graying birds
huddle together in the rain.
American Cemetery at Nettuno
Pope Clement VI guarded himself from plague
by sitting all summer between two fires.
The heat killed off the fleas
and burnt the ceiling black.
He lived to see the corpses piled up, the ceiling
painted over.
The knack for knowing how to cope
lies in how to know what comes back.
These crosses seem to sway and curve—
their lines extend away, their names
are all the places that were them.
No fires kept these fallen from harm’s way.
The day’s too hot, the breeze is stifling
calm and hot. My sons say,
Dad the ocean’s there behind us,
you can hear the waves.
But all I hear are cars,
the tires rush against the road.
The gateman lets us in. Bevelaqua,
he says. His name means drink of water.
The day’s on fire.
These dead come back—almost a fourth of all
who lie here—named or unnamed
are Italian.
They sent the homeboys back
to fight in Sicily and Anzio.
The dusk is coming on,
there are too many names.
Pylon
And the young ones?
In the coffins
Miguel Hernandez
At night,
aluminum boxes
slide down steel rollers
out of the belly of a plane.
Names from a new wall
count off a kind of cadence,
marking time
no one hears.
Trucks wait to upload
their cargo.
Shadows edge the airstrip,
a greasy rain begins to fall
Station to station
In Johnson City at Tri-City Beverage
in 1968, Sully and I
pulled quart bottles of ginger ale
two at a time from conveyor belts.
We stacked the wooden cases row on row,
the pallets pushed against spinning metal rollers.
The first day a bottle slipped
exploding on the concrete floor,
I shook, startled at the sound.
The crew boss laughed and shook his head,
you never know, he said.
Down the line
the dispatcher called out—
two-five, four-five.
The bottles
clinked, slid toward us in wet rows.
We ate our lunch out in the open
straddling the stacks of empty pallets
in the company yard.
You don’t have to be a genius, Sully said,
to see where this job leads.
Broke, spending our last dollars
in a factory bar, I knew
I had to leave some things behind—the town,
the long days of work,
and Sully, gone half-crazy with his own years
there, alone, grinning in the half-light.
We inherit grief, it clings like sweat,
like the ribbon of blood
from a wound
that will not heal.
Above the main street, the arches widened
like the road, etched with the words—
Home of the Square Deal,
erected by the workers.
The wounded
There’s a kind of slanting late winter light
out on the edge of a field,
so when you look closely, it’s like a border
only fluid, moving.
A group of wild turkeys
feeds on the juniper and bearberries
near the entrance to what the locals call
the other Arlington –
a hillside cemetery off the old King’s Highway,
and that light is coming toward them.
If you listen you can hear
the soft clucking sounds they make.
Today in the glare of the super-market light,
my son makes me look at lobsters
piled on one another in a plastic tank.
They don’t move much in there, he says.
They’re stunned, I tell him,
their claws taped up, waiting.
Outside in the late March dusk
a cold rain on stone, you think of them—
trapped in their tanks
or hospital beds.
Portrait of my father with Caravaggio’s hands
He starts a charcoal sketch,
a quick one of Island Lake–
the summer mist lifts.
Now he fleshes out the background
and shifts to color.
I see him turn toward me–
I’m better with faces and people
than landscape.
And instead of Dante’s head
or a bust of Raphael,
he gets the whole of it—
a crowded gallery of faces.
His hands are not curled or shaking,
but thick, articulate,
able to get the eyes right, the brow.
He looks at his hands
and thinks of Caravaggio,
of the silver coast—
the boats at anchor there.
I see my father swim into deep water,
doing the crawl–
he moves in graceful strokes toward a raft
anchored in the waves.
I see his arms rise and fall
in the dark blue water.
I call out to him
as if it were still summer,
and a son could call his father back
from the edge of that world.
Photo courtesy of bcmomsample poems
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