A bottle moves

A bottle moves

It lies, unspeaking,
A model of red along a line
Of wine boxes in Spanish,
Sleeping spoons with
Its sisters and brothers
Same blood, similar casing

It’s in the kitchen
On the red and white linoleum
Watching the cooking
Sustaining, uncorked,
Waiting to be served and
To serve.

The good soldier,
It’s the quiet child at the doctor’s,
Taking the shaking screw
Stoically, even with
Accommodation, then
Drinking the fresh air

Dinner awaits.
The bottle hums a tune
Decanted in engraved
Pewter, a mistress posing
On butcher block.
Dinner awaits.

It breathes
Near the cherry unit supporting
His old friends a marble
Fish from Spain
Beach lavender
A cruel Punchinello

Those intoxications of
Another day, earlier
Cousins, grape grandparents,
Children of our earth,
Intoxications, those lovely
Times, so simple and kind.

Plumbing

Atheist

On a day when a pipe breaks or

there’s no hot water or

the toilet won’t flush

I think of the give and take of

fluids in and out of my house

and of the man or men

who have come to mend it,

the plumbers with their

wrenches and tubing and fittings

who finally attend to my need for

a warm bath and the odorless removal

of my old shit; my house is my church,

my place of prayer against disasters,

floods, decay and drowning and

given my clumsy way with practical

things, with economic survival, with

cars that wear and break, with a house

that needs care in its old age,

my plumber with his tools

on the floor in the kitchen

is my angel on his knees praying to a god

who insists only that he meet him

halfway to bliss, by grunting and sweating and

bending and solving and finally rising,

turning the faucet on and off and on,

thus satisfied with water again

flowing silently out of my house

into some place known to him

and his god, but some place

as strange to me as heaven.

Husband and wife

They didn’t so much smile as relax their lower faces, unclench their jaws. They walked with a unspoken purpose, they didn’t totter, nor did they rush. There were no words spoken between them but they could hear each other breathing, his breath occasionally making a palpable noise like a hum through his lips, and she could hear air flowing out of her nostrils, like whispers from her thoughts. If you saw them, passed them walking by, you could see their memories surrounding them, but their path was always ahead, if somewhat toward the ground as if a map were drawn for their journey in the cracks in the pavement.

On the beach

The Nude Beach Photographer

He talked with his hands.  He pursed his lips and asked questions
By tilting his head and posing to me
His shimmering, hoping eyes.

He yammered
and flapped to the next page of his book of photos,
and the next, and the next,
and told us what was on his mind when he took them.  
On a big box camera with a tripod in the sand
He leaned like a loopy clown who might drop at any minute.
We oohed at every picture.
His eyes moved to each of us
Like pointed lenses
Resting quickly.
His thoughts flew from his mouth
and we weighed them
and he watched us,
and he flipped to the next picture,
and the next.
In each there was something glowing:

Candlelight curving over black shoulders;
The echo of a young silver moon
on the sharp edge of a deck
In the darkening sea;
The teeth of an old woman
Smiling to a row of field stones, her
Straw hair in a bun;
A woman's backside upside down in a handstand
On this very beach where we now stood, a strange man
Seated beside her, reading a book.

"Look, it's 'The Story of O'!" he said;
he tilted at me for a long-last second,
That one moment when I might have been part of a beautiful picture,
and not just standing out on this beach looking in.

Dog biscuits at the wine shop

Every time I buy a bottle of wine, I ask her the date as I’m writing my check. Before she answers, I guess: January 5^th? Oh, I’m afraid so, she says as if remembering better days. That’ll be $14.03. I play along, I thought it said $12.95.  She lowers her head and raises one eyebrow, biting her tongue rather than accuse me of being an idiot. There’s a harsh chuckle trying to escape the back of her throat. Well, that’s before Mr. Cuomo gets his cut, she smirks, having made slight adjustments over the years from Pataki to Spitzer (briefly) to Patterson (almost as briefly). Oh, yes, I apologize, as if it were my fault or I was trying again to avoiding paying my state taxes. We move on to the weather. Again, I’m diplomatic, but she has none of it. Well, at least the sun is out, she says, but doesn’t sound at all pleased. Snow? I ask. That’s what they’re saying, but that’s only after the cold—the harsh chuckle has forced its way out of her tight lips. Well, I guess it’s what we can expect for Albany, I smile, apologizing for all of upstate New York and its inconveniences and miseries. As far as I know, except for a short Boston childhood she’s lived here all her life, and she has managed this little shop and has watched skies darken,  and roads freeze over, and has listened to the bad news and the dour violins on her old radio for at least 20 years. She’s known my dog, and given her treats, since Lucy was a pup, and she prefers the dog to me, even now when the poor thing is achy and cranky and bony and blind.  She’s always grudgingly pleasant, as if fighting her own will to be nice, like that stuck chuckle, but one thinks if she had her way there would be no customers—or at least no purchasers—with questions about Merlots and credit cards and demands for boxes, the only humans even worth acknowledging would at least pay in cash and would be there because of dogs, and she could ignore me while she bent down to give the dog a treat and talk to her: Now, I didn’t hear any chewing, you can do better than that. And the cranky old dog would try.

Zenith

On the small screen with curved edges and a glass surface that was olive green when dark in the middle of the dark brown squat fat console with gold knobs and a metal Zenith script plaque also gold, there were Laurel and Hardy shorts that we watched from our dusty sofa, within earshot of our mother’s kitchen noises, boiling and sautéing and bubbling, and rich smells of greasy potato pancakes or French toast at breakfast time or onions and garlic for the tomato sauce in preparation for our father’s dinner which we would eat the minute he arrived from work. We were in love with Stan and Ollie’s simple voices crackling inside the box and around the bare walls, and we smiled knowingly at their simple solutions to accidents and catastrophes that all ended happily. I think I smiled nonstop and curled my legs under a favorite wool blanket; my sister’s laugh was loud and harsh which I found to be a somewhat surprising reaction to their silliness. The windows in the room overlooking Dyckman St. from seven floors up fogged up as the hot air from the kitchen met the cold panes and condensed and the room closed in like a big cave. You couldn’t hear traffic and you couldn’t see pigeons on the ledge but you knew they were there, nonetheless. The television antenna arms pointed in a vee toward the far walls where they made sharp, long shadows which would sometimes sag and the movie would be all white and grey scratches of Laurel and Hardy’s black suits and hats running around a scratchy town, escaping from danger, making them even less real than I already saw them to be. That was the best and worst of it, how unreal they were, colorless and flat with mechanical voices that broke under the looseness of a sound tube or a loose wire. But all the same, they gave us such real pleasure that we could pretend almost anything, imagine this and that, thrills and hunger and confusion and delight, and feel safe.

Chocolate Cocoa Puffs

The Boy Scout camp, where we stayed, my father and I, with other graduating Cub Scouts and their fathers, was deep in the woods but just a short way from Hempstead Turnpike some 15 miles from home, the long strip of metal and glass, car dealers and diners and electronics mom-and-pops and an amusement park called Jolly Roger, a road barren of homes and grass and sidewalks, but the woods were deep and claustrophobic. It rained at night ticking on the tent top and soaking the ground beneath our cots. We had managed a fire in a barbeque pit, or rather my father did. He managed a lot for me when I was disinclined to manage for myself, or was in a mood, or was unable to express my anxiety, but I don’t remember feeling safe nevertheless or comforted by the struggles of other tented fathers and sons barely visible in the woods around us. Lying in our cots we didn’t speak, my father smoked a Camel and doused it in the mud beneath his cot and perhaps he slept for a while, and perhaps I did and perhaps I cried or wondered where I could go in the dark and breathe and run and I groped around in my pajamas in the rain in the dark, looking for the mess hall to go pee. In the morning we broke down the tent, or rather my father did, and we went to breakfast in the nearby hall from which I had retraced my steps the night before and gotten lost along the wet ground and among the tents of other fathers and sons, now missing our tent as almost a home, missing my father's silence. My father ate a big breakfast and went out to smoke in a misty morning while I opened a small box of Chocolate Cocoa Puffs and smelled its contents and poured them into a cereal bowl with milk and tasted them, the sense of them mixed with the spin of the passing Hempstead Turnpike cars from the height of the roller coaster at the Jolly Roger, the heavy haze of Camel smoke in the car ride home, my rank wet clothes, my usual summer headache in my temples, down my throat, I remember clearly as if it were now, but clearest is the memory of the smell and taste of  wet Cocoa Puffs against my dry tongue and around my teeth just this moment closing around me.