E. Michael Desilets
UpstagedThe fiddler stepped back from the microphone.
The cellist, eyes closed, red gown commanding the spotlight, took possession of “Da Slockit Light,” provoking remembered and imagined visions of wakes, funerals, untended parish graveyards. The piper pumped his right arm gently to add his solemn drone. Three sophomores on Palmer Street crouched in unison to peer through the window just as the lights failed. SnackingIt was cheap Madeira but Connie loved the smell, the moldy
fruit fragrance of her father’s pipe tobacco, and it went well with the cornbread her daughter bought at Whole Foods. She slips her hearing aid into her apron pocket and shuts her eyes. She hears the local freight whistle past Mile Post 88, the dyspeptic theatre organ at the St. George belch “Over the Rainbow,” the Globe whack the front door, the teacups smash against the refrigerator. Today’s calls had left her a tad desperate: a raspy handicapped woman named Jayne hawking light bulbs. The Arbitron man reminding her about the radio diary. She still hadn’t spent those six sinfully crisp dollar bills he’d sent, but she only put on NPR to help her sleep. That recorded message about Propositions 29 and 30. She did look forward to voting at Our Mother of Good Counsel Parish Hall, though sometimes she turned in her ballot unmarked if she couldn’t find her specs. She always lit a couple of votives in the church afterwards. Her sister, goddam her to everlasting Hell. It was Nick’s night to stop by. She was hoping he’d bring a case of that $2 champagne. It would be something. The Boston and Albany Gang ☊
Conlon the yardmaster smells like an old barbershop. Bay rum
generously splashed on his cheeks. Wildroot dabbed on his blacktopped head, blended in with a wide-tooth rat-tail comb. Talcum on his shaved neck. He dusts the pages of the Daily Record with a powdered doughnut while he waits for the switching crew to trudge up the stairs, then gulps his coffee––cream, two sugars––as he rises to full height, authority glinting in his unsmiling Irish eyes. Are the savages ready? he asks Bengiovanni the conductor, who ignores him as he laboriously sorts the switching lists and tugs on his blistered nose. Are the savages ready? in a deeper tone, moving closer, smoothing his pompadour with both hands, the rest of the crew greasy and hovering and ready for anything but work. Bengiovanni smiles, showing very few teeth, brushes doughnut dust off Conlon’s freshly ironed shirt and leads his crew back down the groaning stairs. Savages ready! he calls back, his voice mockingly operatic in the stairwell. Conlon is satisfied. He goes to the sink and scrubs newsprint off his hands. Jazzing the Accelerator
Snowy mornings were the worst, the old man
clomping in the hallway outside our bedrooms berating us in unison with the neighborhood wind: Come on, boys, snap it up. Movie stars, every last one of you. Up all night, sleep all day. Our eyes clamped shut, we could still see him, can still see him now, doing his exasperated flatfooted dance in his Stetson fedora and Robert Hall topcoat, his cheap rubbers barely covering his wingtips. While we were still screening our drool-drenched dreams he had showered, shaved and moved his bowels: The Clockwork Dad. You guys should eat more fruit and follow suit. He'd smell sharply of whatever scent we'd given him last Father's Day or Christmas or Anniversary. If we didn't look alive fast enough he'd prod the bottoms of our feet with his car keys until our brains pulsated with patricidal fantasies. Seven sons united in filial impiety. Incensed by our lethargy, he'd call each of us Hey Joe, though none of us was so named: Hey Joe, you’ve got somewhere to go. And there were always four or five jalopies to start up to get us wherever that was. Cursed by driveway snow, most had, like us, succumbed to the horror of the broken day. Our father, under each hood with his few tools—pliers, screwdriver, hammer, bloody handkerchief—would bang his magic into carburetors and spark plugs and alternators and radiators and batteries while we'd sit sullen and frozen and underdressed behind steering wheels turning keys awaiting those totemic words: Jazz the accelerator and let's get this tin can rolling! So we'd give it the gas, trying to nap with our right feet pumping away. The old lady, cleverly sedated by The Up All Night Creature Feature, would be snoring away like a movie star, soon to be upstaged, we hoped, by multiple roaring engines. Any Girl Looks Good in Summer
crooned the Quahog Bay Quartet
to the sidewalk sightseers, their segue to “It’s Always June When You’re in Love” utterly masterful, vocals slick as pomade in Cape Hill’s last parade. Baton twirlers kept the time right as Eagle scouts rolled old vets past the War Memorial into the dwindling shade of the Common. Mayor Mawhinney, hunched by Capt. Danforth’s Cannon, whispered his usual swell speech into the dead microphone. Then it was lobster rolls and clam cakes and baked beans and maple walnut ice cream cones and sarsaparilla all around. Next evening the front page of the Chronicle looked like old sheet music. Breakfast Special
Cassie limped a bit that last winter
at the shore house ankles annoyingly swollen the twins battling in her belly Sanford stayed in the city dictating his perpetually unfinished biography of the mayor to his research assistant’s attentive breasts naked in the bathroom mirror the cranky Atlantic reflected over her shoulder Cassie still looked radiant the tattoos on her upper arms undercutting her joy the Saturday he stopped by shuffling into the kitchen in his preposterous galoshes he asked if she’d mind whipping up some pancakes he was famished he was about to add when he saw her eyes for the last time and turned around Katrina in Lake Cochituate
Just briefly a water sprite
she takes the brunt of the sunset on her olive shoulders, the light slithering from her as she regains her footing in the drifting canoe. She imagines Natick Indians at prayer in the darkening forest behind her noiseless moccasins tracking her thoughts through the dusk all the way to Salem, where tomorrow she’ll pick up a bunch of witchy books at the Blessed Be Shop to read on the bus back to Jersey.
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Old IronTypewriters at yard sales squat in relief
against toasters and tireless bicycles, always ready to tell you something. Even gibberish delays the eyes, precipitates a cursory search for meaning, a disgruntled delight in mere literacy. One Royal veteran, rusting with iron pride, clamps in its guts a sheet of stationery from the defunct New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad Company. Someone–Years ago? Yesterday?–X’ed out the names of the trustees, who were X’ed out themselves the previous century. The old machine is simply too inexpensive to believe. And much too cheap to buy, one more chunk of the unnecessary. Literal junk. Typewriters at yard sales. Noon Rush
Andrea
always carried a bag of red-dyed pistachios to the Common and gazed at Officer Burke directing the stalled traffic on Concord Street till half-past one Maurice Slocum–“Slow Moe” to those who bothered with his existence– loved what the nuts did to her nibbled fingertips as she sat and stared and pried on the bench nearest Newberry’s Andrea was Moe’s crimson-fingered enchantress his one gnawing obsession and if it hadn’t been for that cop he might have said hello How Far to Being & Nothingness?God
if I remember my Spinoza is a point in space moving at infinite speed a kind of ubiquitous incorporeal Divine Benign Shark more fathomable perhaps in my grade school catechism as the Ultimate Being Machine who made all things and makes damn sure they stay made a concept possibly somehow related to that "matter can neither be created nor destroyed" business we were taught in Chemistry class maybe Satan who ordinarily is not as tough to keep track of whether you're reading Milton or watching cable television or just twisting twisting slowly in your own homemade void is a bit like an eschatological traffic cop hanging out on the fringes of time giving bad directions Solid Gone
The nephews and nieces
called him Uncle Space and he moved placidly through his allotted time hobnobbing at the finest pizzerias with unabated insouciance stopping often for Bud Light genuflecting before penne and meatballs chili-cheeseburgers French dip sandwiches side orders without end. Amen. He hummed a bit at the start of every sentence and seldom spoke in paragraphs. He obeyed his own rules, never eating farm-raised salmon or day-old doughnuts. Unlike the rest of the liberal-arts-afflicted family he could use a slide rule with aplomb. He knew what numbers meant but nonetheless when we went through his closet we discovered he’d kept all his old belts. Anonymous Among the GnomesBefuddled by butterflies,
Amanda stretches to full height by the white roses to unkink her back. She lays her straw bonnet on the sundial and, stupid in the sunshine, catches a glimpse of herself in the garage window. I look, startlingly, like-- She cannot retrieve the name from the rubble: her ancient widowed aunt, the large-breasted one from Sudbury who loved to dither in the garden, had no memory to speak of, and cursed like a fallen archangel. She can recall her trying to swat hummingbirds with a rusty hand hoe. No. That was from some old novelty song her uncle used to sing. Alicia? Abigail? Adele? Agatha? A Red-sided Garter slithers across her Wellingtons. She attacks with an obscenity-laden trowel. The snake escapes unscathed. Not so the hydrangeas. Bing Guy ☊My father was a Bing guy, crooning
“Where the blue of the night meets the gold of the day,” maybe on his way out the door, or “Please, lend your little ear to my pleas,” while he stood at the stove stirring spaghetti sauce, a dishtowel tucked into his waistband. Yet, every so often: “You had plenty of money in 1922 . . .” Ancient financial history. “But you let other women make a fool of you.” Dad in a blue mood, echoing a dark lady’s lament. “Why don’t you do right, like some other men do?” Then he’d sing solemnly into the simmering sauce: “Get out of here and get me some money too.” I was a resourceful lad, had a bike and paper route money, found the song at Balboni’s Drugs on a 99¢ RCA Camden anthology: Lil Green on vocal, Big Bill Broonzy on guitar. I saw the song was written by Kansas Joe McCoy, Memphis Minnie’s ex-husband. Not the old man’s musical neighborhood. He was a Bing guy. Years later I finally tuned in to the white lady who taught Dad to Do Right: Peggy Lee, Girl Singer and Goddess, holding her own at the mike in front of Benny Goodman’s Orchestra. My father was a Bing guy, but Peggy caught his ear and held on. Peggy. Also my mother’s name: a perfect poetic coincidence. Peggy, spinning Lil Green’s Bluebird 78 in neon hotel rooms on mean rainy Sundays. Something out of Edward Hopper. Something out of Cornell Woolrich. Something out of America the Beautiful and the Cool. Could be he heard it on his sister Viola’s Crosley or on Armed Forces Radio while I was lying in my crib in that Concord Street apartment, my mother reading True Confessions nearby. Peggy and Dad and Lil: a magnificent, melodic ménage a trois. Like Muddy Waters, Lil Green made her way from Clarksdale to Chicago, where she died on my 10th birthday, bequeathing to us the ultimate musical query. |
