I’m in love, love, love with
Patty-Penny-Cindy-Linda-Brenda
before I know what love is.

She is cuter than all the other girl
sin Mrs. Mendenhall’s class and
worth all of Uncle Dale’s teasing;

pinker than Bazooka Bubble
Gum at the candy store across
from Wiggins Street School;

sweeter than Saturday mornings,
cartoons and Froot Loops with
six extra teaspoons of sugar;

yum, yum, yummier than homemade
ice cream churned by uncles after
bailing hay on the hottest day of July;

more real than a bloody nose
on the school bus, my first
cigarette in the woods;

more thrilling than coasting my
bike down Glenn Road hill with
“look-no-hands,” or riding the
Wildcat at the Knox County Fair;

more terrifying than, alone, nearly
drowning in the Rose Lynn Campground
pond and no one believing me;

more pure than reciting Hail Marys
on Wednesdays for Confession and again
on Sundays for mass and Catechism;

as guileless as her smile for me,
only for me, holding her hand
only once on the playground, wishing,
wishing, wishing for just one kiss.

Only you could catch me.
Auntie, this is your memory,
But I’ll gladly abduct it, or
Let’s say, better yet, whoever
Lives longer absconds with it and
Is required to tend the recollection:

You, just fourteen at the bottom
Of steep, basement stairs
And me, just four at the top,
I seized the chance of flight,
Flung my little body at you,
And you had no choice but to catch me.
It was a good thing you were looking,

But I knew only faith, not doubt.
Only you could catch me.
Still a child trapped like me,
We recognized our comradery.
Mom shrieked and swore;
We escaped; we were free.
Only you could catch me

Not once have I wept over art
in the Louvre, Uffizi or Met.
Well, almost over van der Weyden’s
Descent in the Prado, Mary’s grief,
but that may have been indigestion
after Madrid’s tapas, the Museum of Ham.
A lithograph in Chelsea,
Kathe Kollwitz’s dead mother and child
splayed, stiff, discarded on the curb,
brought a single, quiet tear.

At the reception, the gallery on Water Street,
I am at first preoccupied with drawings,
paintings, prints, porcelain; delicate, curious
assemblages, diminutive Constructivism;
with wine, cheese and those gooey sweets
with marshmallows, coconut and caramel;
with the hot breath of claustrophobic
conversation. In a corner, a soprano,
hired for the evening, presses “play”
for her boom box accompaniment.
Unexpectedly, the press of gawkers hushed,
from this spare, pretty young woman an aria.

At my age, too cynical or circumspect,
on most days, I assume nothing
may move me so again, but with
her voice, sobs come suddenly,
exquisitely pure, crystalline tears.
All pretense and pettiness fall away.
Instantly, this moment is beauty.
I am Saint Teresa in Ecstasy,
her voice piercing me with divinity.
However skeptical my arrogant past,
this, at last this, must be God’s love.

Though my mother is long dead, my sister estranged,
I cannot account for the specter. After over forty years,
the image, the memory returns to me lately, haunting
my afternoon routine, all its edges garishly distinct.

The turn began at the end of summer, nineteen-seventy-
two or three, the last tubing and camping trip with
the Buskirk and Weaver kids, The Caves at Millwood,
along the muddy Kokosing River.

After one too many days of fun, fun, fun, of hotdogs
and marshmallows, hair and tee shirts reeking of smoke,
sticky nights in rank sleeping bags, no showers,
no television, the mighty, sickening aroma of latrines,
sunburned, mosquito and nettle bitten, all parental
wisdom and diplomacy abandoned, we packed for home.

Mom drove the big, red Galaxy 500 with searing black
vinyl. My sister raged in the backseat, demanding
to ride the twenty minutes with Dad in his van, her
preference. After all, she was Daddy’s Little Girl.

She flung open the door and fell out, hanging onto
the latch, dragged along in loose gravel, nearly run over,
a five-year-old action movie star. I screamed. Mom
braked. Somehow, my sister survived.

Here was the hinge of everything afterward, the likely
advent of anxious days: at that moment I witnessed
a turn. Not a turn in my mother, she was the constant.
A turn in me, my comprehension was the pivot.
My horror was my mother’s expression: distant,
indifferent to her daughter’s near miss, my terror.

Within a year, Mom in the psych ward behind heavy,
clicking and buzzing doors, we peered at her through
thick glass, Dad stunned, my sister sobbing, my mother
somewhere distant. I wasn’t surprised.

A Wednesday in Oberlin,
a warm, affable, summer day,
dolce far niente,
under the red umbrella, we’re
al fresco at Lorenzo’s pizzeria.
Bees feast, elbowing for the finest,
pink hibiscus blossoms.
Beneath the table, a sparrow begs,
hopping to a lively mazurka.
My wife objects, but I can’t resist,
and toss a piece of crust,
exceedingly satisfied as the tiny
bird pecks at the edges of lunch.
It occasionally glances at me,
wary, grateful, greedy.
That’s it. There’s nothing more
to this inconsequential moment.
This abundance is enough.

“Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog” By Caspar David Friedrich. Photo by Cybershot800i. (Diff),
Public Domain, WikiMedia.org

On bleary mornings, Eos on my way to work,
twenty years, my matins, I passed a coppice,
a sloughing of limbs, tall, splendid oaks,
condensed diorama forest emerging from haze.
I’d envision a doleful wanderer, an abbey ruin,
Casper David Friedrich’s bleak, romantic
painting. The modern came crashing, suddenly
a rude huffing, greasy bulldozer, a hole
in the ground, a house, concrete, lumber, vinyl,
bramble of wire and pipe, razing my sublime,
though the trees seemed glad for the company —
too much gloom. Who knows? Kids may play
in bits of shade, long summer afternoons,
collect twigs after a wind, and construct forests
for dolls and fairies.

When I went to prune
The limbs, groom the hairy,
Disheveled springs, I discovered,
High in a crook of the apple tree,
A slight, soft armpit hollow,
Or the tender back of a knee,
A solitary mushroom growing there.

What an obscene little phallus,
White, erect, exquisite, its round
Head a button for a king’s mantle,
The stem curved precisely
As a girl’s peduncular leg,
The underside delicately gilled,
A sea creature undulating
Along the bottom of the Pacific.

How did the spore find
This remote place, improbable
Shangri-La perched on the Himalayas,
Miniature utopia for mosquitoes,
And thrive on the smallest
Measure of light, soil, moisture?

I’m sure there are many more
Arcadias, vast, impressive landscapes,
California sequoias more majestic,
Requiring greater awe, eyes wide,
Mouth agape before the sublime.

But who am I to fell this timber,
Slice it and fry it in butter?
Delicious! I’ll magically shrink
Myself into this pixy forest
And when the sun is harsh,
Loll in its shade awhile.

I could be Charlemagne.
If I examine the plat,
Lines and measures survey
So many feet from here to there,
Staked with orange, florescent paint,

My realm of house, yard, wood,
This soil, the worms, wasps, rabbits,
These wildflowers, my vassals,
Courting deferentially each summer,
These trees, all bow to me.

Absurd! Actually, the wind
Possess these boughs — the wind,
Pillaging the scene of the Pacific,
Conquering the Rockies and Sierras,
Marching cyclones across Nebraska.

During calm days of respite,
The wind away invading Appalachia,
I could be Charlemagne,
My reverie of sovereignty reigns,
Circumspection heedlessly fades.

Then, when the wind decrees
Again, he’s the benevolent lord
And tousles my head a little
As if I’m an inconsequential boy.
I doubt that I am Charlemagne.

Today, the wind rules all,
A raging tyrant bellowing edicts,
Scoffs at my illusory dominion,
Vanquishes nests and squirrel hollows,
Bends every limb, loosens joints,

Turns every leaf inside-out.
The wind is Charlemagne,
A great pair of omnipotent hands
Shakes me by the shoulders
Until I kneel or break.

Much younger, first acquainted
With certainty, it tasted as crisp
And tart as a green apple,
But its edges became precise,
Interlocking gears, a vast machine.

I governed impeccable itineraries,
I tallied every petty minutia,
Mortgages, insurance, taxes,
Attempting to grasp water,
Exceedingly specific molecules.

Now, I have this urge
To blur all edges,
Debussy rather than Mozart,
Monet rather than Ingres,
The haze, the ubiquitous haze:

A simmering August morning,
Heat steaming off the dew,
When the rasping din
Of cicadas muddles the head
In mesmerizing rhythm;

When the fog is dense,
Oceans and sky mingling
At the wet lips of horizon,
Vaporous words washing upon
A shore, a diffuse La Mer;

Like the estuary of young lovers
Who, intoxicated with infatuation,
Can’t drink enough of the other
Or the old couple, fused, no longer
Distinguishing one from the other;

When cataracts obscure
Our vision, our memory mists;
In the attempt to recall,
Thought is increasingly elusive —
Which truths remain unequivocal?

That moment at dusk,
The blending of day and night,
I doze but still hear
The noises of routine, a dog,
A truck, an unhappy baby,

Vague pieces of conversation,
I hover, a magical levitation,
Between consciousness and dream,
At the eradication of hours,
At the blurring of edges.

When I was a young man, Dad lost everything to the bank: Jet Cleaners, a marriage, our home on Glenn Road, our predictable, idyllic, suburban routine. When we moved to town, my little sister and I were decrepit, worn out after the catastrophe. Now everyone was too close together.  We staggered up the broken, treacherously icy stairs, careening like Laurel and Hardy in winter to the apartment, the sagging, exhausted house on West Gambier Street. Jo’s Chateau of Beauty was in the back, Hyle’s Typewriter Repair in the front, Kenyon and civilization five miles east, the flat, monotonous Midwest five miles west. It was there I became acquainted with Old Clyde and Mrs. Hill, though I failed them both.

Clyde was “Old Clyde” as we only knew him as old, and we never wondered if he was ever young. Clyde rarely drove his long, wide, black Oldsmobile he named “The Machine.” We worried for him and pedestrians in general when he fired up its engine on cold mornings. Clyde was a frail, pale but dignified gentleman (neither “spry” nor “geezer” applied) who shuffled alone through his white house. Once Victorian, once modestly grand with a little gingerbread embellishment, the porch leaned as if it said, “Give me a minute.” His wife loved the view out the kitchen window.

Clyde looked forward to saying “howdy,” though half his resources for the day were expended in one greeting. As Clyde was essentially deaf, the entire neighborhood knew his narrative. We were never sure if his volume was for our benefit or his. When Clyde wanted to accomplish one last home improvement, he hired me to paint his dining room ceiling. I wondered who there was to entertain. But brittle wallpaper peeled beneath the new, white coat, rolling with the roller, the task a disaster. I gave up on it. After forty years, the image remains crisp: Clyde’s crestfallen expression, the defeat in his shoulders. Dad offered no wisdom for me when I failed Clyde, when I refused to take his money.

Mrs. Hill was the only old black woman I knew in our town in 1978. We never knew her first name, but imagined Esther, Agnes or Helen. Mrs. Hill lived in the faded, green house, a hideous pea green of army fatigues, one particular patch of jungle camouflage, but surely a left-over, unwanted hue. She was next to where we tore down the garage for more parking. Tools still hung there. Clyde must have borrowed hammer, pliers or saw from the previous owner. They might have been friends, their wives gossiping and cooking together. Both widowed, Old Clyde and Mrs. Hill shared a fence.

Mrs. Hill sat in her house dress in her lawn chair on her concrete stoop, waiting for her sons to stop by and looking out for my sister circling the block on her bike. There was nothing there but Mrs. Hill and her stoop. Mrs. Hill was missing a few teeth and seemed unconcerned and un-self-conscious with their whereabouts. She was balding a little on one side, and her voice rasped and wheezed from long, luxurious drags on cigarettes. But her laugh was easy, generous, and frequent, though it cost her a spasm of coughing. Her whole body shook. I thought she would topple out of her chair, and I noted the location of the nearest telephone for an ambulance. I’m sure, when she was a silly girl, young men were taken by her bright laugh and fell in love.

My identity was nebulous at nineteen, under construction; still, Mrs. Hill listened to me. She relished my youth, my impatient plans. So why did I frequently avoid her porch and walk a different street? I wish I’d noticed Mrs. Hill listening to me and paused at her stoop to fill and shorten her afternoons just a little more. However unlikely, I wish I’d somehow finished painting Clyde’s impossible ceiling.