Tuesday Poem: Previously published in Footwork in 1987

Barn Fire

vomits flames and smoke into yellow day,

about a mile ahead down the Thruway,

leaves us breathless in the car,

searching through the trees

for a glimpse of the fire’s

hot mouth, as we draw near,

barn skeleton like a

child's drawing in black crayon

vibrating over a floor of solid flame,

walls gone; everything going to charcoal.

I think about hay –

how sweet it is, fresh from the fields,

how it chafes and generates

heat when it’s shut away,

sparks and goes asmolder in the dark.

I was sixteen when my father begged

Uncle Dick to put him in the hospital.

He was terrified, he told me,

that he’d kill himself.

Our mother and he were separated

a couple of years already,

but she drove the two hours it took

to get us up there, soon after he called.

The plastic bracelet hung on his wrist

as he asked me for a light, as we

sat in Rockland State Hospital’s ]
dayroom, a poisonous fog around us, as he

chain-smoked Pall Malls, letting them 
burn down to little cylinders of ash.

He coughed as he talked, a fire 
slowly rising in my chest as he ranted.

Did we know they took the mattresses

off the beds, forced him to pace

back and forth down the hall,

like a moving target?

His hands were shaking, his long 
tobacco fingers pinching the cigarettes 
flat, as his voice cut the air, my throat 
going so raw, I could barely swallow.

Did we know they were starving him?

His supper last night was a 
slice of bologna, and a handful of dry 
spaghetti, with a packet of ketchup.

He cried so hard at the thought of it, 
he couldn’t even choke it down.

We’d bought him another carton of Pall Malls, 
a Life Magazine, a Look. The blister around 
my heart was getting bigger; I could hardly breathe.

It’s only temporary, Tom, try to 
hold on, my mother said. Then she 
told us to say goodbye to him, it was 
time to get going. He asked us for hugs.

I remember my hands beating the air 
around his shoulders, like homeless swallows.

The closest I could come to any comfort.

Tuesday Poem: Published in The Passaic County Community College Anthology in 1989

Black Dress Poem

  Isn't it a bitter thing to think of him floating that way...

  and no one to keen him but the black hags that do be flying

  on the sea.                         

                                                J. M. Synge

                                               Riders To The Sea

Daddy, I used to smell your T-shirts

lying so white in the drawer,

as I put the laundry away,

long thoughtful breaths,

leafing nervously

through the old photographs,

you kept hidden under the socks,

looking for clues.

It was my secret ritual,

leaning against the foot board

of the pineapple-poster marriage bed

that had always been too small for you.

Pictures of you as a young Marine

in bar after bar surrounded by friends,

their faces so many smiling moons

held close by your gravity, some Rita

Hayworth woman on your arm.

The eight by ten

Mommy talked about

through gritted teeth:

Lola with the long red nails

who was crazy for you

but wouldn't have suited the family.

My father the Admiral's Orderly,

with a mustache and a forty five,

dressed in your battle tuxedo:

an open pack of Camels

your boutonniere.

It would have been impossible then

to imagine that you stood

on the rim of a bottomless well

that would eventually swallow you,

or that your children would have to turn

their backs on you to save themselves.

Daddy, all the years you kept from sinking,

by pouring a sea of beer down your throat,

I searched for you everywhere,

despite the shadows. I want to tell you,

I saw you, I saw you, even though

a curtain hung between us:
too heavy for me to lift.