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E. Michael Desilets - 2


Broadway & 116th

mounted police
were waiting for him
at the subway exit
 
he wasn’t about to explain
he was headed home
from an old movie

Spencer Tracy
Me and My Gal
Joan Bennett

during demonstrations
cops on horses
discourage explanations
 
and prefer you gallop wordlessly
down the hill toward Riverside Drive
and enjoy the jittery Jersey skyline

On My Sixth Birthday

What I wanted was a carrot
but I could not find orange
in my grandfather’s garden
that snickering spring day.
I could not escape the greenness.
 
Even the tomatoes were colored
by the stark spring green.
My uncle, inhaling disdain
deep into his doomed lungs,
knew the carrots were hidden
underground. He lingered
on the back porch steps
savoring his knowledge
and his mocking smoke rings.
 
He wasn’t much
for sharing secrets
or anything else.
I did in time inherit
his old comic books
that he left piled
beside his bed.
I’ve always been slow
to figure things
but nowadays I know
where carrots hide
and where my uncle is buried.
​

Sidetrack's Last Haircut

Maybe he’d been a brakeman
like he said, rattling around
the Old Colony
and the Boston and Albany
until he swam through booze
all the way to the end of the Crazy Track
after his betrothed drowned in Farm Pond. 
 
The sticky fistful of quarters was enough
to cover his simple request:  Cut it all off. 
Casella used the clippers and carpeted
the hardwood with the longest hair
he’d ever seen on a man. 
 
After Sidetrack loped away smelling of talc
the barber doused every inch of leather and metal
with Vitalis and wiped it all down with a crisp linen towel. 
Not much else happened that Tuesday. 
He switched on the Grundig Majestic.  The Red Sox lost.
 

Locust, Near 9th

She sat on the hood of his car again
hunched in the dark smoking
her old brand.  She had
her reasons and a key
 
she wouldn’t use.  Four floors up
also in the dark but smoke-free
he gnawed on microwave pizza.
It tasted like her tobacco tongue
 
and made him cry.  He refused
to show himself at the window.
That had been Cool Hand Luke’s
mistake.  She would be out
 
of cigarettes and gone before
the paper hit the stoop
faithful at least
to her punctilious boss.

Learning French

At lunchtime Laura’s left lens
fell out and shattered on Rue de Furstemberg.  Her French
was Hackensack bad
but she pronounced “merde”
with Edith Piaf perfection and at that moment
fully grasped the concept
of “le mot juste.”  She gasped
and spent the rest of the misleading afternoon half blind
misreading emails, headlines, pursed lips,
raised eyebrows,
furtive glances.  Well,
c’est fucking dommage
and all that Parisian whatever.  She had exhaled
the entire day
by the time she confronted
François in the boudoir.
 
He removed her one-eyed glasses
and proffered her a glass
of Grand Cru Red Bordeaux and a glance
she loosely translated as What’s the good word?
I have a “mot” that is “juste” for you, my little baguette,
she said naked to the gorgeous bowing and vowing blur
he had become.  It tickled her
to let it trickle into his ear.
           

Dream Girl

There were a few old copper coins
on the cardboard, a flat piece of waste
from The Dessert Place.  The girl's
feet were bare and grimy, her gritty eyes
the color of the river, the coins,
the shawl draped forever over her
grandmother's head. 
 
The crossing was deserted now,
but the buses would be unloading soon
a block away, and the ensuing jingle-jangle
of coin on the carton would take her mind
away from the cold.  She stuck her thumb
into her bucktoothed face and tried
to burrow into the old woman's
bony lap.
..........Today the river made no noise. 
Later, she thought, she would walk on the water
as far as the Ha'penny Bridge.  It would be dark
then, the fog laced with ice, trash rattling
in the alleys, after her grandmother slid
back from the bake shop muttering as always
about magpies.

Time with Peggy

Mommy smokes Chesterfields
while she breastfeeds
our baby brother Larry.
Later I’ll make you and Stevie
a grilled cheese
she lets me know.
 
Mom says it’s always
easy to change Jerry
because of the brace
that links his ankles.
Once she broke Tommy’s glasses
with her boar bristle hairbrush.
 
Ma trades stares
with Kenny and Lenny. 
They are the last
the ones who let her know
we just can’t last
forever.

One Minute Dead

He was nonplussed to discover
that Heaven was his grandmother’s kitchen,
not the Buñuel film
he had anticipated.  There was custard
in the oven and no one seemed to notice
the kettle whistling.  There couldn’t
possibly be enough beatific tea bags
in the canister.  But Heaven
didn’t
have to make sense.  The linoleum
was still cracked and there weren’t
enough chairs.
 
“Where’s God, Auntie Rie?” he asked his godmother.
She was a girl again, the sublime babysitter
who taught him how to tie his shoes and play
Hangman.  “In the parlor,” she said, her voice
a silken whisper, “watching Lawrence Welk.”

​
Picture
Picture

E. Michael Desilets' profile
Go to page 3 of E. Michael Desilets' poetry

Boyd's Requiem, Cue the Incense
                                                                ~For Ed Warro

Sum me up, Mike, I hear him say.  I can’t
but I can offer a hint, a lament, a chant.
 
He read Rimbaud, revered Berlioz,
kept bags of ground coffee in the freezer,
played “Ring My Bell” endlessly
the year it was released.
 
In Boston
he booed Chloe Owen
as she struggled to be Queen of the Night.
He sent me countless Marlene Dietrich post cards
and a few Louise Brooks.
As far as Visconti goes
it was Death in Venice and The Damned.
 
In Garden Grove
he bought a Hawaiian shirt
at the Crystal Cathedral gift shop.
Tell me about your kids,
I hear him say, and I do,
and I wrote a poem about his mother
after he scattered her cremated remains
among the cats’ ashes in the back yard.
 
In Chicago
I kiss him and leave him with his pain
and flee with my devious grief.
The sound is off at the hotel.
From my window I can see the dark
disdainful waters of Lake Michigan.  Amen

pint number four

glum in the pub
overcast Friday
half the clientele
hooded in protest
against early winter
the special
some sort of nut-encrusted
sea life
 
they were out of chowder
he glared
 
into his shimmering amber pint
then drank
in silent remembrance
of the pagans
who first glimpsed
those few monks
steadfastly advancing over the seaside stones
adze-heads protected
by the hoods of their dank cloaks

Oh No, Pretty Soldier

She stood near the spot
where he once broke
into song and made her laugh
and reach for his twisted shadow.
She eyed the dead
 
leaves and the scattered
branches lurking
in the underbrush.  The tree
was gone.  She couldn’t
remember what kind,
 
though not a weeping
willow.  She would have leaned
against its icy wood forever.
It became her spine
as she felt his shattered
 
hands on her flesh.  This time
she kept her laughter
to herself, sang her own song
and whispered his name
just once.

Anchorage Catholics

upright on the padded kneelers in their diminutive
cathedral except for Sean, whose posture and demeanor
remind everyone of the infamous  pallet-stacking
incident at the cannery.  He hasn’t eaten halibut
since high school.  He blesses himself, mutters about
tufted puffins and chuckles.  Brigid, whose special
intention involves the gargantuan rash on her son’s back,
will have to open the gift shop soon
no matter what.
No matter how
hard she prays, Loretta is destined
to sit in a fat man’s lap
for the foreseeable future.  Wilfred, as always,
prays in harsh whispers  for his mother,
 
whose umbrella he clutches fondly.
She has a tumor the size of a flapjack
draped over her brain, he reminds St. Jude.
Judge Garrett, retired now for an eternity,
busies himself with fussy altar errands,
genuflecting at every opportunity
so as not to slight the Real Presence.
For a change there are plenty of seats
available at the Snow City Café,
where Father Budra  will take his sweet time
over his Ship Creek Benedict.  He hears the wind
zigzag out on Fifth Avenue.  The hearse, idling
behind a troika of tour buses, will be delayed
in any case.
  

Just Another Stroll Downtown

The Trust Company clock,
always a few minutes slow,
remains at the curb,
but the cannon is gone
from the common,
the drinking fountain defunct.
 
So much is extinct:
Arcade Drugs
(soda fountain vanilla Cokes)
Paul’s Bakery
(fig squares and hermits)
Unicorn Bookstore
(where you couldn’t get Peyton Place)
Nipper the Victor dog at Garino’s
(with Bing crooning in his guts)
Gorman Theater
(which opened with The Bride Goes Wild
and closed with Putney Swope).
 
The Memorial Building seems
the same.  Hitler’s Mercedes
was on display there once. 
I paid a quarter to gawk. 
But now the trash in the gutters
speaks a foreign language and I won’t
spot my Uncle John X in front of Woolworth’s
trying to remember where he parked his Olds
unless I’m finally out of luck.
 
I sidestep the sidewalk ghosts who step aside
for no one.  They gape incredulously,
seething with loss, traversing
the same few blocks
over and over, sometimes hovering,
sometimes whooshing past as if
there were still somewhere to go.
 
Downtown welcomes the dead.
They find it hard to leave, but
with eternity just ahead
even the dead get discouraged.

The Hollow Virgin

The last Thursday in March. My turn
to take her home. She jingle-jangled
with each step, sandwiched between
Math and Ancient History in my rattling
rubber-lined canvas bag.
           
My father in the kitchen threshold,
Fuller Brush sample case pulling him
a bit off-balance. Just what is that?
He referred to none other
than the Blessed Virgin Mother
herself.  Molded in ivory-colored plastic.
A foot high in the middle of the dinner table
between the Land O'Lakes and the Miracle Whip.
 
It's the BVM.  It's our turn to say the Family Rosary
tonight, I spouted, gingerly grasping Our Lady
and unscrewing her bottom.
A giant Rosary spilled awesomely
onto my corduroys.
My mother clanged utensils at the sink.
My father regarded her back.
I have better things, he said,
to do with my time.
 
After John Cameron Swayze
said Goodnight, I followed suit,
putting Mary the Queen of My Heart
back in my bookbag and climbing
the twelve steps to my room.  It was a daring night
for radio waves and I was able to pick up WWVA
in Wheeling, West Virginia, with no trouble.  Roy Acuff
sang “The Great Speckled Bird.”  Tomorrow
Tommy Mooney's family would have their turn.

Go to page 3 of E. Michael Desilets' poetry.

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