Tuesday Poem: an earlier version was published by The Paterson Literary Review in 2011

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Milk Time

It was the sacred time: the little cartons

delivered in their plastic crate

by an eighth grade boy

who looked like Gulliver

for a moment, striding through

a cloud of Lilliputian first graders.

A quiet knock, then he’d come in

all hunch-shouldered, quick, and shy,

to set them down next to my desk.

And there they sat, piled in little hills,

like shanties after a cyclone.

How my head spun with the changes

from day to day: This school. No that school.

This classroom that ticks along like a clock,

that one that has no lesson plans, no paper.

This was Paterson, New Jersey.

I was twenty-one: a substitute

who knew nothing about the world

and how it worked.

In one school I nodded

in agreement as the Principal

told me, a red finger nail wagging,

that we must never, never, never

use corporal punishment, no matter

how rude the children might become.

In another I trembled at the Principal’s

booming voice as he hit one of the boys

in front of the class, a trouble maker,

he insisted I identify, and I suddenly

felt so exhausted I let them do whatever

it was they wanted for the rest of the afternoon.

But milk time. Milk time was sacred.

Each one of them carefully opening 

his or her own little house of goodness, 

stepping into a clean white space,

a silence punctuated by an occasional 

bubbling noise, as someone’s straw reached 

into a corner to grab the last few drops.

I didn’t know then that, for many of these

children, this was breakfast. For many of them

ten o’clock rang like an angelus putting an end 

to stomach growls and shaky hands 

that could barely hold a pencil.

All I knew was that at ten o’clock

they sat still. They were quiet, and

they were comforted. I was too.

Sitting at the big desk, in the front of the room, 

I felt like a little girl again, the one 

who stood against the wall in the playground,

watching her classmates ease into smiles 

and whispers, as they filed inside, sat 

at their desks, opened the cartons and savored.

A little girl on the margins, hungry for love.

And here it was: milk time again,

all of us in communion for the time it took,

to swallow that daily ration of decency,

that blessed little half pint that got us through.

Tuesday Poem: First published in Outerbridge in 1987

                   Illustration by Frederic Dorr Steele

When The Junk Man Came Down Summer Street

We stood on the sidewalk 

across from the corner drugstore,

eyeing our own reflections in the green glass doors

behind which Doc’s Great Dane slept 

every night to scare away burglars.

We stretched and pranced 

impatient as runners, waiting for the junk man 

and his wagon to roll like a ghostly wave

across Doc’s little harbor of marble and glass,

the knobs on the soda fountain 

bobbing like white marker buoys.

We followed him down the block then:

past old D’Allessandro squinting 

through Coke bottle glasses

his white hair stiff as the brushes 

that hung from the sides of the wagon,

past Rose Quatrocchi with her 

sons in their shiny red stroller,

past Ralph Molinaro 

who kept pigeons and rabbits,

his backyard bristling with edible blossoms,

past the girls playing hopscotch 

with a hard rubber heel, begged from 

the shoemaker who never seemed busy,

who my father said was a Mafia bookie,

their game interrupted, the girls ran behind us.

The junk on the wagon   

tilted and swayed like the graceful trombones 

and French horns the old men played as they 
marched for the feast of Santa Croce Camarina.

His cowbells were strung 

like stars across our daylight.

They clanked and tinkled 

and floated a rhythm that made us 

want to start skipping.

There was Santa and Rosa

whose  mother could never 

remember their names

and called them Hey You in Italian,

Columbia who couldn’t come out 

unless Baby Jerry came with her,

Tanya and Sonia, and Hanna their sister,

their mother on the porch 

in her flowered babushka.

Then Georgie Capello 

and blonde-headed Victor,

and Sammy the Mongol 

who swore like a trooper.

Even crazy Joe, in his black leather jacket,

stopped combing his hair and came out

to call to the chestnut junk wagon  horse

who seldom looked up 

at the sound of our voices,

his hooves rocking slow 

on the hard black macadam,

inching his way to the corner on rickety legs.

Past the brick stoop where 

Gracie’s Communist tenant

sat by himself every night like a mummy,

past Father Andresani’s cranky old mama

her gray head nodding in time to the rosary,

down to Louie’s where we 

bought Daddy's cigarettes,

and lemon ice with the leftover money.

Louie made it himself 

in a big silver bowl 

at the back of the store

and he told us he made it 

with snow shipped from Italy.

Then the junk man waved 

as he got to the corner,

taking his jingle and clip-clop 

toward 21st Ave. His hat sat so straight 

on his head in the gold and the shadows,

it sent sparks up our spines 

as we stopped at the corner 

to wave him goodbye,

made us suddenly jump Double Dutch

or play Tag in a wild stampede over fences,

and through the network of yards 

and alleyways behind our houses.

On those days we were never glad 

to be called in to supper.

The rust and the clutter, 

the feathers, the moving machine parts,

the slack leather reins in the junkman’s

powerful big knuckled hands,

the spots on the horse’s back 

where the hair had rubbed off,

the plod and the footfall 

lingered in our heads, so we 

laughed out loud in our beds 

before falling asleep.

There was so little junk in our lives.