We poke and we prod
and we wonder if God
has plans where we both shall meet

We slip and we slur
and we ponder what were
the ache of a friendship complete

Such is the truth
of a man in a booth
drinking a whisky and rye

Such are the quirks
of a chick in a skirt
loosing the smirk of a sigh

There seems in the dreams
the twisted sad schemes
to be no joke as we die

So let go an odd poke
and slam out a hurt prod
but hold back each question why

suppose i were a tree
fat in the trunk, thin in the branches
no leaves, or leaving or sunlight
or rain.

suppose I were the dead husk of a tree
no one remembered, except
as the best fire they ever burned
in the warm red brick fireplace
their grandfather built when he was a young man
and I still a sapling.

beloved, it is too much to ask me
what I am, who I might be, where I might grow
most tall and healthy
How I might reach for the sun
one more day

suppose, I were a tree
still young, still strong,
still green and lush and honest about shadows

suppose, we were both trees
together in the cool bright wood
alive and mad with the still love
of every sunny day
and every glorious shower

Beloved, it is not enough to ask
what if
let us be
until we
are the ashes
and the dust
and endless dream
of every perfect summer
since we met.

Dear Papa,

Remember when I was stick-thin? All bones and bruises with a bowl cut? I went to the big old school house, with four rooms and a quarter inch of shellack on the floor. I learned about phonics and Dick and Jane. I watched Ms. Keene every Friday as she drove in her little orange M.G. up to New Hampshire. The rest of the week, I just went home with a head full of nothing and dirty plaid pants.

Do you remember when I was the kid, and we stalked around your filthy ramshackled workshop making little wooden puzzles with your jigsaw. I’d play with them until they broke, or I lost my interest. For some reason, I never painted pictures on them. The color of the walnut stain and shapes of the wood and the grain were enough. More than enough.

After, we’d go to the refrigerator pull out the brown mustard, the cheap liverwurst and the american cheese, and make sandwiches on buttered Wonder Bread. I remember the sound of our chewing in the dusty smokey sunlight. More than thirty years later, and I still smell your Vantage 100 burning to ash in the ashtray and in your lungs. I hear the serenity of a spoon against a department store glass – stirring the generic brand iced tea & sugar before the ice cube could be added.

I was young, and you were too – in a way. Your back hadn’t hunched yet and your eyes were still steely strong. I talked about baseball, and you talked about The Kid. We played with a tennis ball and a stick in your backyard – I was Jim Rice and you were Warren Spawn.

“Always a Braves fan, kiddo, always a Braves fan,” you’d smile.

The ball would slip in a friendly arc through the gentlest evening air – too soft for stars as yet – and land upon the merry swing of that stick.

We both laughed as I ran around the places where bases might have been, then after you’d say, “Spawn.. then Saine … now pray for rain.”

“What does that mean, Papa?”

“Hahahahaha,” a laugh would roll out of your lean strong frame, “Oh Stephan, my back is tired, I think it’s time we go inside and watch the game.”

I did not know, not really, how bad it was for you. How your disks were gone and your back was crunching as you ran. You were tougher than anyone, and I was soft and young and weaker than I imagined.

Inside, I’d sit with the old tarnished door-stop lions and look at your feet. I’d think about the dry dead toe-knuckles and the cracks and the monster-thick nails on every toe but the last – where instead, the nail was just a pebble.

“Papa, Papa, I’ll put some lotion on your feet and they’ll get better.”

You smiled at me, because you knew sometimes things are beyond saving, but you knew that a good heart must true. And I tried. And I tried. And I tried.

Later, when it became obvious how the game against Jim Palmer and the God damned Oriole’s would turn out, we’d go out to get the lottery ticket at the little greek place – I think it was called Massota’s Market. It was on the corner of Main Street and High Street. You’d smile at the old man’s little girl and say, “50 cents on 447 any order.”

“Ok Mr. Fitzgerald!”

Every week, I thought we’d win and so did you. When we did, I’d get a comic book. A super hero comic book with impossible characters wearing bright colors and saving the world from the likes of me. When we didn’t it was just the sweet sadness of a pack of wild-cherry Lifesavers.

Papa, do you remember when you said someday you’d be gone, and I’d be ok. You said it’d be ok. I told you, “No, I can’t live without you and Nana. I can’t.”

You gave me a hug, do you remember? Do you remember how you told me I’d be older and more able to handle it?

When Nana died, you said, “I can’t live without her” and your body shook as you wept and I held you in my arms for an hour or more. I told you, “Somehow, you’ll find a way.”

How we stood there and watched her slip away without slipping away with her, I’ll never know. I thought, perhaps, I was a man. I did not cry. I never cried then. I just held you up and carried you until you could stop your tears and breathe.

Dear Papa, do you remember how cold it was that day when we buried her? Do you remember the hard bright sun and the endless parade of cars and sirens and despair that followed us to Reading where we laid her there to sleep away the world?

I told you, “Papa, I can not live without you, please don’t ever leave me.”

“Stephan, I’m old. I”ll be gone and you’ll go on without me.”

You were wrong you know, there is no going on without you.

Years later, a lifetime or more really, when you died the first time, the doctor in the emergency room said, “there’s a DNR, I can’t do anything without your permission.”

I told the doctor, “yes, yes, please, save him.”

Your heart was stopped, and so was mine. I didn’t cry then either. Not for days. Even then it was only enough tears to remind me that my heart was still there.

You came back and told me, “It’s ok. It’s ok.”

A week later when you got the dying right, I remembered how you told me, I’d go on without you. But I didn’t.

Geez, Papa, it’s been a decade, and your’e still here with me. Your body is rotting in Reading with Nana, but I hear you. I hear both of you. I see you in the dances of the dust in the last long rays of afternoon sunlight. I hear you in every cheap glass as I stir in something sweet. I taste you in every sandwich and I smell you in every cancerous breath of smoke in every seedy bar.

You were wrong. Do you remember when we put the deck on the cottage and it was supposed to last for 40 years. You said, “I intend to be here to make sure it does.”

I want to go check, to see how the pressure treated lumber held up. I want you there with me to laugh at the warping and the cracking and the occassional new planks that had to be nailed in to save it from the world that breaks us all in time.

But even the cottage is gone now. The lake still laps on the blueberry dappled shores, but the concrete walls have broken every year when the ice goes out. The tops of the mountains slide lower every year from wind and rain – and I remember how you told me as we let our worms bob for perch, “These mountains were the top of the world eons ago. Higher, by far, than Everest.”

You’d catch a kibby and toss him back, “Don’t come back. Send a bass instead.”

Do you remember the nights on the dock watching the bats, listening to Ben Oglivie smack the crap out of the ball and us down the standings to irrelevance?

Nana would call down to us over her Seabreeze from the porch, “time to come in boys, the bread pudding’s ready.”

And we’d head up for another sweet moment.

Papa, do you remember me? Who I was? Papa, tell me, who am I?

Love,
stephan

A thin red cedar by a small lake, clear and full
of life,  in the worn out remains of the top of the world
sings of madness

The lurid truth – there is a majestic impossible arc
that curves back on the unverifiable truth: We can not think
about another person, unless they think of us.

The tree bends into the last blush of a nowhere day,
the lake ruffles under the horizon’s gentle breath,
and we think of eachother and how light bends
around the gravity of our situation.

I dream of long reeds
by cool ponds, turtles swimming
in the first whisper of sunlight

I say, “this is earth.” You laugh,
“No, this is heaven.” We both laugh.

The rock in the middle of the pond
is sunbleached and begging the turtles
to come and rest and wait for the warmth
to save them.

I say, “this is heaven.” You sigh,
“No, this is Earth.” We both sigh.

The tadpole kisses the surface
where the water was glassy
now ring by ring, the moment
drifts toward some other shore
we see but do not know.

I say, “What is this?” You say,
“I do not know.”

And we are happy. God,
we are happy.

Mrs. Margaret Vaughn adjusted the thick black frames of her spectacles with her thumb and forefinger as she explained, “Happiness is weedlike, once it gets into your life it grows wild and out of control.”

I would be lying if I told you that I listened carefully to her warbling voice. I heard her, mostly, and I thought about what she was trying to say, but rather than respond, I shook my head and walked away.

I didn’t hear or think of Mrs Vaughn again until the day I read her obituary in the Journal. It was oddly juxtaposed next to an article about the Hamilton County Fair and Mr. Thomas Johnson’s prize winning donkey.

I read about her career, her family, her community involvement and her volunteer work helping those with mental handicaps. I didn’t have anyone to tell, to explain, “this woman changed who I am.”

So I let the universe gently shift away from joy and started to shave. The razor blade scraped away little bits of me from me, and I remembered looking at her. My mind wound around those endless hours carefully examining her every curve, the pale of her skin and the revelation of the myriad ways a woman can be beautiful. Yes, Mrs. Vaughn was the reason for a young man’s first knowing  blush.

It just seemed right to head back to where it all started, so I drove downtown and parked my old Buick by a stenchy little fens and a fat man selling cheap balloons. The circus was in town and no matter how vexing a clown might be when a soul is searching for meaning in a unexpected loss, I still smiled at him, and even considered buying a red one from his pudgy fingers.

I wondered if the bones of hope are like Mrs. Margaret Vaughn’s bones, or the picture of a prize winning ass. If hope can hold up a body, or if it means less than nothing at all.

Answers come, sometimes suddenly. I walked up to the wrought iron fence and realized the old library and 4-room school house were gone. The dirt lot on the other side of the wetlands was mottled with weeds and rocks and black rotted remnant of some old shrub-like plant. I stopped, my hand on the  spiky top of the fence , listened as a garbage truck rumbled past.

“Hey boyo, wha’ choo lookin’ at?” some bum in stained blue rags and dress shoes covered in buckles asked from behind me.

“Nothing, nothing at all. Just thinking,” I muttered at him so he couldn’t really hear, then I turned back to my car.

I could hear the bum all scotched-up braying about how good a ciggie would be. There seemed no point to add my words to this pathetic flourish.

I got into my car and drove past the vacant lot one more time. The weeds of happiness weren’t really copulating, and Mrs. Vaughn was still dead. Even all these decades later, the echoes of her body, her bones, her heart and  words were educational.

I never looked back again at that old lot, but sometimes, I think of it – of her.

“Wha’ choo lookin’ at boyo?”

Nothing. Nothing at all. Just thinking.

If God’s a glittery gaudy God, perhaps I need to be bedeviled?
To walk the holy beaches nude or at least near half-disheveled.

If God’s a bright light fiery being full of brimstone and rage
perhaps I need a better God, that I can keep inside a cage?

If God’s a holy sparerib, a salty laughing cad
I think that that’s the God I’d love – he wouldn’t be half bad.

They say so many things – lies each one and all
All I have to prove is one, but I am caesar – thus I fall.
They lie so many truths and every one seems worse.
I have no way to love them dear, so I slip into my hearse

They weep so many tears – and every one is cruel
I’ll never take their word, my dears, who could be that fool?
They say so many things – their lies are savory sweet
I only love them for their smiles, love, they leave dead complete

i beg the bride of lizards
be the beast of bad choices
she says, ‘ok,
maybe,
we’ll see.’

i beg her, please please
be that wild ravager of no
the ecstatitious mountain of mayhen
and calamity. she giggles,
‘ok, sure sure, just stop, for God’s sake
just stop.’

and the world crashed into the empty space
where the dark part of slivered moon hides
with a boom boom boom and a soft Goodbye.

A poem is a poem is a monkey
A germ is a germ is a fish
A tune is a tune spare and funky
A death is a death is a wish

A word is a word is an ottoman
A frog is a frog is a wall
A book is a book thick and artisan
A life is a life is a pall

Thus in the glimpse of the dastardly
Warmed by sun somewhat bastardly
The truth comes from truth comes from Iowa
The lies come from lies comes from viola

Thus in the span of the table
cooled by some ice from a fable
the lies lead to lies lead to magic
and truth follows truth follows tragic

A poem is a poem is unicorn, oh
A germ is a germ is a book
A tune is a tune hard and porno
A death is a death is a look

A word is a word is a bedpan
A frog is a frog is a chair
A book is a book sweet and deadpan
A life is a life is a dare