Magnolia

Dead Rick

Ten months later, my brother still can’t believe
Rick’s dead.  “His car’s still at his building!”
Rick once bummed some money off my brother,
a hundred bucks, and never paid it back.
Won’t now either, I point out.  He also crashed
a lot on my brother’s couch, especially
near the end.  “That’s all he did, chain-smoke and sleep!”

My brother always carries wads of cash.
Years ago, my father, about to drop
my brother’s jeans in a washing machine,
found in the pockets 90 dollars in bleached,
crumbling bills.  He shook out other things as well,
stones, hamburger wrappers, bottlecaps, the stuff
my brother always picks up off the street.

Rick was 52.  At least he would drive
my brother places, the five miles to work
sometimes, as Rob’s never gotten his license.
But you have to wonder.  “Bob!” he’d shout and cough.
(No one calls my brother anything but Rob
or Robert.)  “Where are we, man?  I don’t know
this part of town, and have you seen my glasses?”

With my father in the passenger seat,
my brother, still in his teens then, slowly steered
the Chevrolet around the neighborhood,
but he never went in to take the test.
Now, in his forties, he rides a mountain bike
up the hills of New Haven to his job
wrangling the outsize carts at a Sam’s Club.

Between Sam’s and Uncle Sam—his benefits
from the government—my brother has enough
to help out anyone who asks.  Plenty do.
Goodness knows he spends virtually nothing
on himself.  But he can’t let go the fact
that Rick is gone.  Every few weeks or so
he bikes the couple miles to Rick’s apartment,

and peers inside the ’95 Taurus
as if he expected his friend to pop up,
from the back seat maybe, rub his sleepy eyes
and light another cigarette.  Rick left
an aging mother somewhere in Florida,
and supposedly a sister lives not far.
Someone will fetch his car, I tell my brother,

but truthfully I could see it slowly
rusting, winter after winter, until
the building’s owner finally has it towed.
As long as it’s there, though, for my brother
it’s as if Rick really might be showing up
any time now, knocking on his door, saying,
“Bob, man!  I’ve got a check coming.  Just let me…”

Fat Kid

Three hundred pounds in seventh grade and growing,
fattest kid in school, Sid in the horn section
nearly blocked my view of our director
from where I labored, back row, on tenor sax.
I could see his neck going pink, sweat slipping
down Dizzy Gillespie cheeks, eyes squinting
as his stubby fingers worked the keys.  We lived
two blocks apart.  The bus ejected us
at the same stop: slight, skinny me; Big Sid.

That first week of school, we all saw it coming,
and when some tall, long-haired jerk shoved Sidney
in the dirt, a circle rapidly formed
and the coaches vanished like Darwinians
allowing natural selection to run
its course.  All Sid could do was raise his fists,
but by then his glasses were broken, and he
was bleeding, and crying, and the crowd jeering. 
Tears stung my eyes, but I let no one see them.

After that single, vicious beating, some kind
of equilibrium had been restored,
a necessary order imposed, which all
understood: Sid had to pay for his weight
with a pummeling, it was that simple.
And once endured, he earned a grudging respect;
his tormentor—now that he had filled his function
for us—meanwhile was relegated
to pariah, and dropped out in early Spring.

And so Sidney survived; the taunts continued,
but with lower volume, less frequency.
We learned our instruments, we rode the bus.
His mother, who might have outweighed her son,
kept to the cool back rooms of their dark house.
But she had to be glad to see him with friends,
even ones like me—as I would kid him too,
once in a while—and he would punch me,
hard, in the arm, because it wasn’t all right,

and he’d make damned sure at least somebody knew.

photo by
James Aubright

Lonely Hearts

Back when they were still speaking to my father,
his two sons from his first marriage brought over
one day their bright new copy of Sgt. Pepper,

hoping to turn my father and mother on
to Lucy in the Sky and Mr. Kite.
I was eight, three years from my first 45,

but even I could see the futility
in their trying to bridge, as it was called then,
the Generation Gap—however timeless

the music.  With college student earnestness
they persevered, my half-brothers, even
setting up the small box record player

they’d also brought, as if my parents’ old four-
legged console stereo were suitable
only for Sinatra and Nat King Cole.

But at least they tried, back then, on holidays
from school they still came over, still would call
my father and sometimes my mother too.

In those days, they thought of her as pretty
and smart and a good cook, which their own mother
would not have wanted to hear.  Had they been pressed,

they’d have to admit my father was happy.
But in time—and you would think it might work
the other way—it became harder for them

to forgive, to stop blaming my—our—father
for the divorce.  Even into their forties,
feet propped all those years on analysts’ couches,

they never made peace with it, could never
understand.  By then they were older than
my father had been when he’d filed the papers,

and each was recently divorced himself—
which, who knows, they may have also blamed on him. 
So by the time his business, finally,

went under, and then the cancer, they were all
but gone from his life.  Each certain, in the way
only a child can be, of his own version

of experience—as if hearing only
what would play on the little turntables
of their hearts, now folded and locked away.

 Sleeping with Death

How do you manage it, night after night,
getting him to take the famous robe off,
drape it blackly on the back of a chair,
leave the gleaming blade leaning in a corner?
Then push him, laughing, from your door each morning?

You know, of course, that in time you’ll fall for him
as you never did for me.  Then the two
of you will run away forever, never
to cheat on each other as you do now.
It’s that constancy that scares you.  But less, now.

The Gift

It could be straight out of Norman Rockwell:
a boy on a swale, swinging at golf balls
with a 29-inch Louisville Slugger,
for his flag a palm tree, his cup a sprinkler hole.
The title might be, Taking Up a New Sport.
The boy is me; he’s eight.  And in the corner,
just barely visible, is a young man,
twenty maybe, watching from the sidewalk
this small figure’s strange improvisations
as he stages entire tournaments
in his head, he’s Nicklaus, Palmer, Player,
back and forth and across the quiet street
till the summer evening finally sends him in.

Then Rockwell paints the second in a series:
it’s later that night; the sitter answers
the door, where in the porchlight the young man stands
next to a golf bag full of clubs.  They’re old,
he’s explaining, but it’s a complete set,
just gathering dust in the garage, in fact
belonged once to a cousin who is now—
here we see the boy appearing from behind
the sitter, eyes widening—because he knows
the touring professional cousin’s name,
has seen him on TV.  Call this one The Gift,
and the child will hardly sleep this night, dreaming
of his future charmed by a first set of clubs.

It’s now the next morning, and Rockwell struggles
with this scene: the boy’s mother in the car,
outside the young man’s house; at the front door
her husband, somber-eyed, her son in tears;
and the young man and his father, confusion,
questioning on their faces.  Between them all,
the bag; like a foursome ready to tee off.
In measured tones the boy’s father is explaining
how his son has broken a household rule,
simply, and while the child continues to stare
at his shoes, his chin wet, his mother can see
something else, something she cannot stop herself
from seeing, because she is a mother:

a warm afternoon, and dusty sunlight
slants down through the jalousies at the back
of the young man’s garage.  Neither father
is home yet, but a tour is underway
among old footballs and chess sets and other
items of interest to an eight year old.
There are few sounds; some birds, someone distantly
cutting his grass.  The young man’s hand touches
her son’s cheek; the boy’s long lashes lower.
Before she can shake herself from this vision,
her child has already begun the long walk
back to the car, sure that his beautiful
future has just been returned and lost for good.