Tony Magistrale

The Last Soldiers of Love

A Book of Poems

A Brown Fedora Book

© Copy 2009 by Tony Magistrale. All rights reserved. This book may be downloaded for personal use only, and only with the author’s name affixed.

To Jimmy the Don, the best Godfather since Brando

THE LAST SOLDIERS OF LOVE

Poems

The Kicking of Balls
Riding Backwards
The Reception
Why Language Matters
Europa
Letters to Felice
Casper David Friedrich’s Landscape Paintings Upon Reaching Cruising Altitude
Buffalo Poem
South of Buffalo
Fathers and Sons: I
Fathers and Sons: II
Fathers and Sons: III
Fathers and Sons: IV
Fluencies
Watching Ringside as Your Kid Gets Pummeled at the Golden Gloves The Red Bicycle
The Men Along the Sidelines
Mother’s Day on Church Street
A Valentine’s Lament
Tonya Harding Agonistes
Large Apple Tree by the Side of the Road Amidst the Carnage
Rockefeller Center, NYC
Halloween
First Day of Winter
Sunday Morning
Walt Whitman Attends the Funeral of Edgar Allan Poe Another Thing About Death
Everything Else
We All Stand for Justice
Blasphemous Rant from the Son of a Lawyer 28 Juvenile Offenders Facing Charges in Destruction of Robert Frost House The Drive-In
The Persistence of Memory
The Ride
Girls in Cars
No Longer Summer
Late September
Since You Been Gone
Twenty Years Later on Facebook

Musings on the Muse
Trouble at the Buddha’s Altar
Knocking on Your Door
Lilacs
Spring Plantings
If
The Massage
Quiet Table by the Door

____________________________________________________________ Acknowledgments

“A Valentine’s Lament” was originally published in The Harvard Review; “South of Buffalo” and “Lilacs” were both originally published in The Vermont Literary Review; “Everything Else” was originally published in The New Verse News; “We All Stand for Justice” was originally published in CommonSense 2; “Letters to Felice” was originally published in The Akros Review.

THE KICKING OF BALLS

Precisely when the bells chime four
on the clock tower above us, the St. Stephan's school door opens and boys and girls
freshly pressed from today's lessons
spill out into the bright Bavarian sunlight. The boys are all sporadic motion and sound, voices lifting with their feet
to the movement of colored soccer balls, heads full of floppy hair
that never stop bouncing. The girls,
more discreet and self-contained,
exit together in twos and threes,
arms often intertwined, talking neatly among themselves. And so it goes
each gender ignores the other,
each has its own established rhythms,
rules for non-engagement. It's a wonder we ever get together
at all, boys hesitating long enough
to find interest in something other than the kicking of balls, girls overcoming their revulsion for the raucous noise of boys. But we do find a way eventually
to break free from our tribes,
cross over to the other side
and co-exist. At least for a little while until the clock tower chimes again
and it's time to go home.

RIDING BACKWARDS

Rocketing along on the Intercity Express,
Augsburg to Berlin, the landscape
flashing by, with each curve another surprise: fields of sandy-blond grains,
the brooding green epiphanies of Linden trees hovering on either side. Standing
in front of a crossing post, a child
still waves long after we pass;
only I am in position
to wave back. Sometimes, a train
going the opposite direction slashes
by, a disconcerting blur of color,
the vacuum of its passing
flush against my window
like some drunken stranger—
swooshswooshswoosh, hard consonants
mark each separate car—and then, nothing. The whole of it disappears
with the same abruptness of its arrival as if from a dream, swallowed back
into the fold of a wavy envelope,
two amber lights receding fast,
far into miniscule distance. Riding
backwards halfway to Berlin,
as close to suspending time
as I would ever want to get.

THE RECEPTION

They have been anticipating and preparing
and spending money that neither
has yet to make—all for this
rarified moment with best friends and the mandatory family members in attendance, piled tables of cornucopia inspired by Prussia's version of Martha Stewart. Too bad this night
won't last long enough for them
to enjoy much of it—so many
demanding a piece of the day—photographer, parents, priest, the long
distance friends and relatives
who did not come all this way
just to be fed. No way
the blank, glazed gaze on the coupled-
for-life pair will fade—nausea and exhaustion will share their bed tonight. But
before then, how many times
will they ask each other telepathically (for there will be few opportunities for marital discourse) did you expect it
to turn out like this? Darling, neither did I.

WHY LANGUAGE MATTERS

Sitting in a Munich biergarten next to four
young women who are smoking and drinking

coca-cola and appear not to have
spoken to one another for years

instead of the hour that has elapsed
since their last cell phone communications,

I decide in a stunning courageous overture no doubt inspired by too much beer

and the halo of conviviality currently
engulfing the table, to introduce myself

in passable German that produces
a veritable blitzkrieg of questions

leading to my sheepish confession
I really don't speak much German

but do any of you speak English?
Nein. Polish and Russian are the other

tongues tonight, and so I am consigned
to watch their conversation slip

back into the ease of its animated chatter exiling me in a cloud of smoke.

EUROPA

Here’s what Americans will never
get: after so many masters
she chooses no longer to obey.
Although married to the past, she is
mistress to the present—at once she is a musty scrapbook of photographs
inside a bawdy bedroom. But
mostly, she is an expensive
whore—still remarkably beautiful
despite a history of abusive lovers,
and skilled enough to pleasure
the most jaded appetite. Just
don’t expect to see again
her vulnerable side—the tears
are done; she can’t
cry anymore.

LETTERS TO FELICE

I am a mendacious creature;
for me it is the only way
to maintain even keel.
My boat is fragile.

—Franz Kafka, Letter to Felice

Wandering the streets of Prague
New Year’s Eve, 1914. Was that him
standing in the Munch painting
alone, staring blankly, looking ill?

It was not solace he sought
self-torture his bride, a reminder
he still wore clothes—
hypochondria the small change of angst.

Letters to Felice, two, three a day
fighting the human urge;
while she was becoming the center
of everything, but the work
and the compulsion to be alone
could not be compromised.

Can you hear your love?
It pounds in my veins, rushes
through the heart. But remember
you must never come too close. After all,
you are a girl,
and want a man, not a flabby
worm of the earth.

She sought sensible wants of wife and nest: mortgage and children,
good food and central heating,
bed by eleven. He could provide
only deathless guilt and forever
vulnerable body and brain.

These others, when they marry

are very nearly satiated, and marriage is but
the final, great, delicious mouthful. Not so
for me. I am not satiated,
I haven’t started a business
expected to grow from year to year.
I don’t need a permanent home from whose
bourgeois orderliness I propose
to run this business. Not only do I not
need this kind of home,
it actually frightens me.

There were brief drafts of sleep
exhortations and benedictions
escape from adulthood
in the ominous shape of a father’s shadow that neither understood nor tolerated
the terror of standing upright.

If one bolts the doors and windows
against the world,
one can from time to time
create the semblance and almost
the beginning of a beautiful life.

The quest was not so complex
as the biographers would have it. Smallness was all to slip unseen from the world’s pull
turning outward in
to a room, a novel, a letter,
to quieter, lighter, smaller still
until all the pain
disappeared into a final period.

CASPAR DAVID FRIEDRICH’S LANDSCAPE PAINTINGS

Never so much as a breeze in motion
All of nature in solemn repose
Despite such sublime quests
Far beyond painted borders.

His spectacular windows,
Frames of transparent white,
Thresholds and barriers both: separating While beckoning horizons of possibility.

The men and women in his pictures
Their backs turned away from us
As if we are the ones stuck in the past, not them, And they busy anticipating the future.

Drunk on dream, these rueckenfiguren Inhabit places both familiar and exotic, Where tension between mundane and imagination Measures the distance to eternity.

Little wonder they are utterly preoccupied Pulled out of domestic smugness
To contemplate uncertain journeys
On maps bearing unrecognizable quadrants.

UPON REACHING CRUISING ALTITUDE

Airplanes aren't the only things
to lift off, staring down an eternity's length of lonely tarmac, revving Rolls Royce engines into thickening thunder, thrusted instantly up, skyward, majestic glistening shadow cutting across morning light.
The humans strapped to seats inside
never more aware of their dependency
on a fate outside themselves
ride in helpless abandonment
through the wild winds around them
while projecting thoughts about what awaits below, at our final destination,
when black wheels smudge the earth again bearing us down through ephemeral carbon plumes as one journey's end
becomes another's beginning.

BUFFALO POEM

My father gave me his tickets
with a resigned I’m too old for this shit secretly glad to be done with another losing season and its last game, Buffalo and Cincinnati, neither team going beyond this inauspicious ending, deep in December, the Lake Erie winds
churning up a steady curtain of blinding snow filling the stadium like a silver bowl, the players on the field indistinguishable, unable to do more than skate their way
on frozen cleats across albino tundra.

Sitting thirty five rows up, Karla Decker and me underneath an old bulbous blanket my mother donated tucked under a lip of the end zone
amid the empty seats of section 43
squinting out from beneath the blanket’s frozen plaid edges to steal surreptitious glances at the game below unable to discern what plays were out of bounds the lines so obscured
and not really caring.

Because the real action was under the blanket for more kissing inside the tented dark of our private huddle as much in love with this snow globe moment and each other as any Sunday
would likely provide either of us again, even as the white afternoon enveloping us turned blue, and then faded to black.

SOUTH OF BUFFALO

Cleary and Chris and Rooster and I
were riding to the stadium to join the faithful on a silent Sunday morning and watch our football team

play another game, even as we all knew they would find a way to lose and break our collective hearts. It was raining

a hard, brittle rain
when we passed the gray concrete column grain elevators south of the city. Nothing

moving for miles, just ghosts rising up from a soupy mist and running through tall wet grasses growing between rows of rust-

orange factory buildings that once made the machines of America. We were gazing on monuments to a world that had moved on

and won’t ever be coming back, like the first people who discovered the unsettling mystery at Stonehenge, or the last refugees to stumble back into postwar Berlin.

That game we’d been anticipating lost some of its luster as we wondered who was left to tell this story, and who would even want to.

FATHERS AND SONS: I

When I was a young man
my father and I used to speak
about the old country, how
his father vowed never to venture back
even for a final look
because all he ever knew there
was poverty.

My father
had his own reasons for never visiting; a successful product of the dream,
he worked hard so I could
return in their places—the
prodigal son who sometimes regrets
feeling more comfortable in Europe
than in their America.

If they
were still alive, I don’t know
what my father, much less his father,
would say about all this. But I like
the thought of them both
joining me here, at some quaint
brauhaus, as my son did in Munich
last week, and we would prost together the circular nature of dreams,
the bridging of the gap.

FATHERS AND SONS: II

My son arrives from Paris to visit
me in Germany. We travel together

touring cities and their museums,
riding trains from one mispronounced town

to another. Two years in Europe
have changed him. He instructs

me about the color strategies in
Van Gogh's palette, orders our

wine and lunch in French, and
navigates the conundrum of a city map

or multi-tiered subway system
with the aplomb of a native.

He has turned out to be more
human than I could have hoped

possible, especially when thinking back to his neighborhood turf wars against

other children, or when he slammed
my car into the back of a bus.

The gap between then and now,
here and there, belongs to

some stranger’s lifetime
until I enter the room to find him

asleep in the bed next to mine
and bend to touch his still

flaxen hair and listen to the deep
swells of his breathing. Then it is

we most resemble father and son again
and the years dissolve around us.

FATHERS AND SONS: III

You used to say

it always took someone to die

for real change to happen.

Stubborn humans and the compulsion
to cling

to our addictions. Can a father

become an addiction?

Must he necessarily

die first before

his children gain

their freedom?
Gone eight years

what have I learned about fathers

and freedom? That
I no longer look over my shoulder
shadowing each decision with
indecision that I live without
recriminations or fear of disappointing you in letters or on the telephone.
Does any of this

begin to balance the hole

left in your absence

the other side of the ledger
where a displaced orphan
stumbles his way through middle age

my own sons hungry

for guidance waiting for

their father

to give them permission
to make their own mistakes.

FATHERS AND SONS: IV

My grandfather was only ever a peasant.
A charcoal maker, fare di carbone, from Bari, Italy, he never went to school
and couldn’t write his name. But
he understood the value
of second chances in America,
opened up a restaurant in Buffalo,
made enough money to send
his own children to school
where they learned to write in English. In turn, they flourished, made
their own money, married well.
Two Italian friends of mine arrived
to visit me in my father’s big American house. After dinner one night,
they asked me perplexed,
how could it be that my father lived
in such a big American house
yet spoke Italian like a peasant.

FLUENCIES

When I was growing up
I remember answering late night water calls to find my father in a corner in the living room sitting beneath a lamp
reading a biography of some troubled President or a magazine article,
unable to sleep, worried
about money or his children.

Or perhaps was it was just the silence, that ominous silence
creeping up through the dark floorboards from somewhere outside
steadily working its way into the house to speak its two a.m. language.

And I remember,
as I was not yet conversant
with this silence myself,
how I never understood
why he was sitting there
alone in the living room,
under a cone of bright light,
and not asleep in his big papa bear bed next to my mother.

WATCHING RINGSIDE AS YOUR KID GET PUMMELED AT THE GOLDEN
GLOVES

He hides a swollen face behind fat fingerless gloves,
that beautiful face his mother
kissed good-night every night and still would if he would only permit it,
but tonight the $5,000
smile I bought him is on the wrong
end of so many punches. For each of his, that face takes three; the guy
beating him is a cyborg killing
machine and my kid never seemed
more meat and bone.

From darkness beyond the ring
his brother and I project the same telepathic thought go down, go down, you brave dumb fuck,
but he is the second son
and my father used to say not unkindly
this one will march to his own beat
his head slowly turning down,
rolling his body into a long elastic watery wave, reminding me of the green plastic Gumby toy I bought him one Christmas years ago
that would stretch into a thin
elongated scream without breaking.

THE RED BICYCLE

wasn’t a week old
since his grandfather’s
birthday present when he
left it unattended to go
inside the Mobil quikmarket
to buy a grape soda.
Twelve years old ought
to insulate a boy
from adult tragedy
but all he could do
in between sobbing heaves
was stutter I chased
after him until my sides hurt
and I just couldn’t run anymore
and then I watched him
and my new bike disappear
behind the bottle factory.
I slapped him once, hard
across the back of his still sweating
head—the sound from my hand
loud enough to silence evil
or reawaken it.
His shock registered
at a point where I
can still see this
thin line of spittle
dropping down
slowly beyond his open
soundless mouth
for what words are there
to describe such betrayal?
Something else I remember
from this awful event
and it had nothing to do
with fatherly rants
about careless ungrateful children.
It was that I
never hit that boy again

after I went out
the next day
and bought him
another red bicycle.

THE MEN ALONG THE SIDELINES

Saturday afternoon, cold to the point of bracing
a scrim of winter frost on the caulked field a thick white blanket covering the geometry of sport.

Every Saturday, the same men take their places on the sidelines intense, seldom smiling, their arms folded across expansive bellies or fists fidgeting in front pockets
each of them drunk on the fragrance of mud and a willful suspension of time and place.

Every Saturday, they come alone
leaving wives and small children, thirty year mortgages and the monotony of money,
to remember the purity of adolescent adrenalin down the sidelines, eyes focused
on the peripheral blur of bodies and colors racing along the long white line
that separates everything, expanding to infinity.

The men along the sidelines
are invisible to the cheerleaders;
no coach will ever again call out their name to chastise or praise. Instead, they watch the game unfold in silence
until it is time for them to go,
exiting the field
impervious to the final score
their heads stiffly bowed.

MOTHER’S DAY ON CHURCH STREET

He wears a suit and tie on Sunday
when the rest of us are happily clad
in shorts and tee shirts. His black
mustache is neat and trim,
although his hair, long and thick
is streaked with silver. He walks
close to his wife, occasionally slips
his right hand into that soft spot under her elbow. His wife is a lovely woman, chestnut-colored hair pulled back
off her face into a tight pony tail.
His arms and hands move delicately,
like he’s conducting an allegro movement for strings, as he saunters alongside her
and the sleeping child she pushes
in a small blue stroller. From beneath oversized sunglasses the wife turns to look at him raises her eyebrows in mock surprise or bestows a smile of bemused tolerance. She has heard her husband’s current complaint before— how she overcooked last night’s pasta,
or the outrageous cost of everything.
They walk slowly together down Church Street and into the lazy afternoon light.

A part of me
wants to follow this couple home, recognizes them from a photograph of myself
taken years ago. And that part of me
wants to remind these strangers
to pay attention to this moment—to
appreciate the dying light embracing them. The light will return
another day, but never quite
like this, never again when they are both this young, their child
this content
listening to the rise and fall
of her parents’ sonorous voices,

drifting into a gauzy sleep
on a late afternoon in late spring,
the sound of the stroller wheels
more soothing than a lullaby.

A VALENTINE’S LAMENT

“Valentine’s Day remains one of the most stressful shopping holidays of the year for men, and most of the time they fail.”

—New York Times article

It’s late: 7.45 PM on St. Valentine’s
Day and I am queued in a line
a dozen deep, staring at the head

tops of boys and men, shaggy-haired
adolescents looking to get laid, bald
husbands who have been laid enough

all fiddling their dollars, waiting patiently as three women work feverishly
at Marie’s floral shop to gift wrap

our redemption. Despite a parade of days hawking jewelry and perfumes, stuffed
animals and lacy bras, we have waited

too long and now are bereft of time
and ideas. Desperate to avoid feminine wrath we are the last soldiers of love

standing in fourteen degree weather, each of us wondering will roses freeze on the trip home, will the shop run out of flowers,

and where, O where, is Cupid’s arrow
to pierce the still night air
like a snowball to the heart.

TONYA HARDING AGONISTES
For Sherry Brown

The worst sport in the history
of sportsmanship, directing boyfriend thug and leaden pipe to lovely rival's knee. Because
she dared to do
what the rest of us only secretly project— who among us dares
to cast that first stone?

So, let's see some sympathy
for her free fall into obscurity,
the spotlight's cold withdrawal:
female wrestling gigs in Berea, Ohio,
a “Greeter” job at the local car wash
(tight wet tank top a requirement for the Greeting), while her perfect alter ego, America's peaches-and-cream darling, kept everything spinning into gold—from figure eights to Disney on Ice contracts, who wore
dresses instead of leather miniskirts,
underwear in place of thongs,
and never once ventured drunk
into the back seat of any strange boy's car.

In hindsight, some
might insist Tonya exercised consummate restraint in cracking only one of those legs.

Milton's Fallen Angel understood
the fierce oppression of divine light
and no doubt shed sulfurous tears in Hell that dark Olympic winter night
when Tonya's skate lace broke
along with the last of her pride,
leaving the world to witness
such visible anguish in a competitor’s lost dream—her mascara-tinted tears,
like ink blots on ice.

LARGE APPLE TREE BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD

They are deep within gnarled limbs
of the large apple tree
like ripe fruit bowing branches
six children climbing
living ladder rungs skyward.
The tree shakes with their
small movements rising and
falling as if windblown in a storm.
Invisible giggles and taunts
filter through thick leafy blossoms
startling adults on the sidewalk passing by whose first thoughts are to look
for microphones in the sky.

AMIDST THE CARNAGE

Want to know the great equalizer?

It's neither money nor power that makes women Behave like men; it's shoe sales.

And not just a sale at the mall, Kmart or Sears,

But a Designer Shoe Sale at Barney's, Madison Avenue Where three ounce, mile-high, feathered straps

Glued to dime-thin base composed of sex

And Christmas tree ornaments,
Each one at once hard and soft,

Sharp and smooth, an army of variegated colors

In bold defiance of nature’s own
Are all half-price. It's a mania that men must brave

To remember whenever wives and girlfriends

Accuse them of taking sports too seriously With condescending headshakes of rational superiority

As they exit the room disgusted.

Designer shoe sales are the great equalizer Turning sisters against one another, friends

Into vicious competitors armed with formidable

Lurid red stiletto heels and a positive delight In the hobbled exasperation of other females.

Nor is this a place for the uninitiated

Who will never understand the transcendence I saw in one lovely woman's ascent from plush velvet couch

To wobble, lopsidedly, on one deliciously delicate

Absurdly expensive and utterly impractical party Shoe, a smile transporting her from overcrowded showroom

To the legendary place she dreams someday

Of wearing them, perhaps while descending a staircase, The envy of every woman in the room.

ROCKEFELLER CENTER, NYC

The day in November when they
brought in the monster spruce from Maine or New Jersey suspended from the arm tip of a giant red crane, its seven tons
dangling in midair, like an
ornament on the edge of a bough,
the gathering crowd watched in silent awe heads posed in identical uplift
as workmen lowered the tree into a concrete base. No one was sure it would hold a balance, limbs stretching out like the wingspan of some great green bird in preparation for flight,
or perhaps instead
to take one long step
down onto the silver ice below
where twirling skaters in red sweaters and white gloves might carve out
a place for Christmas.

HALLOWEEN

A sun empty of warmth speeds its way across a
horizon terrified by the bloodied sky it leaves in its wake, a reminder that summer’s languid permutations have long past.

Soon, the streets below
will fill with gothic eccentricities of the season: terrible wizards and the walking discorporate, transgendered crossovers wo/man into the other such exquisite freedom celebrated only this night when everyone’s libido is finally unleashed.

Later, abandoned by the innocent seeking candies, their older brothers and sisters transform downtown into hybrid horror show/bordello: a reprise to what haunts us
in nocturnal nightsweats: the sex & death trip once again commingling
as Hollywood serial killers saunter
hand-in-hand with heavily rouged
golden-haired fairy princesses,
their sweet laughter rises up in the dark blunting the edge of November’s arrival.

FIRST DAY OF WINTER

Snow falling fast,
since daybreak, two feet equalizing everything into the same lumpen mounds
of indiscernible white; trees and
bushes humbled by additional weight,
liberate their boughs in explosions
of misty powder.

This is my third time
out today to add to the elevated
heaps on either side of my driveway
a roofless tunnel to the sky.

The neighborhood kids
have had enough, retreated red-cheeked
and exhausted to Norman Rockwell kitchens, their mothers’ cups of steaming chocolate.

It’s just me
and winter left outside, alone in the driveway the occasional beast of a yellow snowplow rumbling along inside of blizzard of its own making, leaving me another layer, heaviest of all, just when I thought the work done.

Watching weak afternoon die
inside a pewter sky empty of sun,
still white, except for my son’s
black leggings and hat surmounting distant horizon, snow-crusted golden retriever
trotting along at his side.

SUNDAY MORNING

My Sunday mornings are as comfortable
as an old sweatshirt: a languid breakfast, time outside with the dog, the privacy of a bulbous newspaper.

So forgive me
if I found this Sunday morning so poem-worthy as it was spent wrapped in your arms,
the world outside us occupied
with an unexpected January storm,
snow falling in perfectly straight lines into albino silences beyond my window.

All those Sunday mornings without you
piling up high between us, making me
a little crazy—my only explanation
for the hunger you surely felt, the heat sealing us in its own immutable envelope against the memory of so many cold days.

Should I apologize for such neediness
on a Sunday morning? I tried reminding myself to eat slowly from your delicious mouth, savoring your salty taste on lips and tongue, but each kiss quenched nothing,
left me ravenous for more
our mouths quickly bruised in an ardor
that must have shocked;
I gratefully stole your deepest breaths.

A stream of twenty-five Sundays,
each resembling the one before it,
receded like the snowmelt
from your big black boots
puddling on the carpet beneath us.

WALT WHITMAN ATTENDS THE FUNERAL OF EDGAR ALLAN POE

What drew you to Baltimore that cold, dank
October, to drop everything and travel
by stagecoach from Manhattan, or maybe you were already in town,
heard about the hastily assembled funeral, felt some pity for poor Edgar Poe,
stuffed with poison, bereft of family
and so few friends, owing everyone money and at least an apology.

I'd like to think
there was something more to your presence that day besides coincidence or a cool literary curiosity, something more deliberate to your trailing the thin line of mourners in the mist
to the little churchyard on the outskirts of town. Despite your youth and cosmic vibrancy, your every un-Poe-like inclination,
you had a reason for being there,
sensing secret bonds with the king of pain. Poe's art finally a simulacrum to your own, as if you were both prisoners toiling
on board the same slave ship,
passing each other across mirrored pages until the undeniable recognition
that you were indeed blood brothers, split selves, exiles from the shadows of the same fever dream.

ANOTHER THING ABOUT DEATH

Another thing about death
Is that it's not just one person’s one-way Ticket. Death changes everyone in the room, Especially those left behind
Shouldering the trunk
Heavy with memories and held by a frayed strap, Staring down the empty track’s silver length For a train that won't be coming back.
There is the understanding left to regulate That despite such loss so much remains: The image of a good woman
Hovering over the kitchen sink, the bedroom vanity, The garden out back,
Who knew things about us
We never wanted any living being to know And continued to love us more than we deserved.

EVERYTHING ELSE

There are plenty of dollars
for everything else—computerized warcraft to simulate angry birds of prey,
Homeric armies that search and destroy, more prisons. Ringed

outside the magical circle
everything else has gone to shit—
bridges reveal their skeletal underframes rust burnt orange,
the roads upon which we drive expensive cars explode in an acne of war zone
pot holes.

Our truest concession to globalization
is a third-world mass transit system,
and for fifty million
the real terror threat
is getting sick. Some

where within their protective web
keeping us safe from the Islamic
jihad, they forgot to protect everything else.

WE ALL STAND FOR JUSTICE

In their absolute world of right and wrong,
we all stand for justice
even if justice proves an elusive
construction, pursued by overly determined men in Armani suits with silk ties, and
women who strut like men in power
pumps wearing no makeup and never smile. We all stand for justice
in this solemn and serious room
where boy-men are processed
in and out of the system (why is it always so much easier for them to get in
than out?) for various affronts against the State: thirty days for alcoholism
at the wheel, a week for mouthing off
to a cop, seven hundred dollars
for fighting on the street.
The suits prosecute boys and men
who are still boys leaving each one
to hang his shaggy, stupid head in sorrow. We all stand for justice
and especially for their failure to learn anything since the last time they stood here
promising never again
to have their miserable fate derailed
by some stranger wearing a robe or uniform enamored of his own cologne
who could sincerely care less.

BLASPHEMOUS RANT FROM THE SON OF A LAWYER

It is a business that processes wayward bodies,
never forget that it is just a business for men and women who are attracted
to the administration of discipline on everyone except themselves.

They will tell you
law constitutes a fundamental fabric,
law is what separates us from the uncivilized, law strives for impartiality.

None of this has ever been true.

The law is filled with its own bluster. Its goal never the justice of a just result, but winner takes all in an adversarial game in which we all pretend to play with equal resources but rarely do.

Their designer suits and carefully
worded briefs eviscerate the innocent
with the guilty, the reverence
we supply to their every robed pronouncement, like going to church midweek.

All part of a dangerous script that none of us gets to edit, that obscures
the cash nexus, the mercurial displays of raw power, and our careless abdication of freedom
under the misplaced faith
that the State knows what is best for us, like some mad, schizophrenic father,
a righteously upstanding suburban patriarch, magnanimously attired in the morning
but under the glove of night
hides the work of a bloody fist.

28 JUVENILE OFFENDERS FACING CHARGES IN DESTRUCTION OF
ROBERT FROST HOUSE

I've been inside: more cottage than house
tucked inside Vermont backwoods. It took human animals to destroy what decades
of coons and skunks and moose
curious enough to glance up at the darkened windows and, seeing only empty chair and silent chimney, moved on. But not the 28 high school punks who had to study his poetry in English class, but didn't learn much from it,
who needed a secret place to copulate,
some dry spot out of the cold and the snow to drink beer and smoke some dope. All that would have been just fine with everyone; they didn't need to trash the place—
break his chairs, vomit and urinate in the bedroom, scrawl obscenities on the walls. But that's what wayward schoolchildren do
when no one is home to watch them.
Frost was young once, too, and capable, his biographers say, of his own violence and wickedness. And so this is how I picture him,
drawn to the flashlights flickering inside his secluded house, the dozen cars parked indiscriminately in the meadow below,
muttering who are these people?
not quite sure what to do next,
pissed as hell.

THE DRIVE-IN

Colleen Dolan and I spent our Friday nights
not watching movies from the back seat
of my father’s green Oldsmobile—crushed velour, like the upholstery covering the furniture in my mother’s parlor. But I never once dared to touch those chairs or sofa
with my naked buttocks
even though they were securely condomed in plastic, removable only on holidays and for important guests.

The movies we paid to see—
The Graduate, Getting Straight, Beach Blanket Bingo—
simulated the action
going on inside the car,
our teenage experiments with vodka
and orange juice, the unscripted fumblings in a makeshift bedroom
located last row back where the cinders ended and the pine trees sucked in breath
each time the wind blew.
Drifting through layers of consciousness, we remained anchored
to the silver metal speaker
its static sputtering of sound
hovering, like the face of the moon,
our very own voyeur, pressed tightly
against the car’s cool window
watching the two of us stutter
across thresholds in the dark.

THE PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY

What better reminder of the danger
than Lot's wife, looking back over lovely shoulder, punished for a last glance back into the past. So, how to explain
our own compulsion to recapture
the scent of a receding perfume—
at once precious and precarious,
that seduces at the same time as it exhausts?

An unexpected break-up—
the melodrama unfolding even as we entered Christmas party ambiance
her drunken slurred, stumbling, sprawling; skirt ratcheted to mid-thigh, stocking split in long sutured gash, smudged mascara
encircling eyes, red-blotched and desperate.

Why are you doing this? Is this
what you want? Why won't you talk to me?
It could have been either one of us
asking, but this final time it was her to me as she skated on recent snowmelt the length of wooden floor, her boot heels suddenly too high, too thin, propelling her into confused revelers.
Amid the pendulous thrashing of
lanky arms and legs once so adored,
reduced now to a prurient interest
from strangers eagerly assembling
to watch whatever was left to disassemble.

What persists in memory
was my urge to disappear:
anywhere but this terrible junction
where outrage joined with shame.

THE RIDE

Augusts are all I ever remember about
summer, the clinging
to a certain ending that sits us straight upright, demanding our closer attention. This particular
August there was that yellow dusk,
the summer sun a fierce red dot
eye-level, slipping slowly into the lake, like a sailboat at the edge of a long horizon. In the afternoon's sweltering heat
you curled tightly into a ball
in the passenger's seat,
your short black skirt riding up high on your thighs giving me a glimpse back
to the little blond girl I never knew
barefoot, her toes thumping the black dashboard to whatever song was on the radio,
shucking green peas, sucking the little round balls, then chewing their emptied pods
white, as we drove north,
then south, up and down the Interstate, the wind messing with our hair
night slowly drifting down
covering us under its big blue veil.

GIRLS IN CARS

Dusk: The deep blue hour is upon us.
A summer stillness that concludes
an August afternoon as we drive slowly, top down, the radio playing softly,
something full of longing from Springsteen. You are sitting next to me in your short summer dress, all sun-kissed blond and tanned, big brown sunglasses, shiny red lips
just painted. I am compelled to confess I have dreamed this moment
my entire life, since as a boy
in Buffalo, when you were always
someone else's girl. But not tonight.
Tonight, those years and my yearning
appear as far away as the stars emerging above us. How lovely then to lean in close
and steal another kiss from you
to seal this perfect day spent together, store it, like a farmer's
sweet hay saved for a winter day
when the winds will be arctic fierce
and the seat next to mine
once again vacant.

NO LONGER SUMMER

how to capture the not summer
moment I found yesterday
on a bicycle peddling home
through late afternoon slants of fierce light and the near perfect silence of endings although there will be plenty
of hot afternoons still to come
there was a certain stillness
to the hectic nature buzz that both
schoolboys and old men
might recognize a little sadly
a hesitancy in the air
as if the moment could be taken
at any moment and so it will be
as it is every summer
in the appreciation of how
delicate late summer afternoons are
and how ephemeral
less about golden light and fecund smells than whatever lurks
just up ahead

LATE SEPTEMBER

The deep-valved hum of crickets and cicada
slowed to signal change.
We prayed to keep it another hill or
two away, despite the date today
when the calendar poked a hole in summer. Its warm air leaked out
as it has been known to do
leaving us holding a deflated bag of regret. The leaves are still full out on the bough but they are as purposeless
as old men—withered, awaiting the exorable. Wind rising softly beneath them
like rustling sheets of yellow newspaper. In the streets children stand in silent queues
already acclimated back
to routines of accountable days and
nights long in length and shadow.

SINCE YOU BEEN GONE

I didn't do it deliberately
set out to drive by your old house to see its black windows staring vacantly back at me, the little brown flower garden you tended the last year you lived here. I didn't expect to spend time looking at any of this on such a golden Saturday in October the sky bluer even than your eyes but there I stood
my hands in my pockets motionless
across the street from the big maple tree in the front yard its leaves bleeding red up against that clear blue sky a combination so bright it almost hurt to look. But I did: drank it all down like a glass of cold cranberry juice bitter as it was sweet and stayed long enough to watch a small breeze flip each leaf halfway across itself like little discs of fire beauty enough to distract me momentarily from what this maple tree in the middle of your abandoned yard meant
its dead leaves scattered on the ground below those few left clinging to black branches above reminding me of old men who stand
alone at a bar or in the middle of an empty street confused refusing to go home even though they know they have had too much to drink
because they have lost their way somehow have forgotten what home is supposed to feel like now or just knew too many women who have upped and moved away.

TWENTY YEARS LATER ON FACEBOOK

Photographs of her and her people.
So long gone that her new friends,
Two kids, even a suburban husband
Are all unrecognizable. I feel like
Some cyber spy peering into
The intimate rooms of her
Clean, new life at least half a world away Embarrassed but also highly impressed
At how well she has purged
Herself of our little town.
It was only ever on loan,
Even as she lived it
The past merely a prelude
To take her somewhere else, someplace
Better, a worthy inclusion on Facebook
Where strangers stare back at me
From inside an unfamiliar house
On an unfamiliar street
From a future so beyond
My ability to comprehend
All I can do is blink.

MUSINGS ON THE MUSE

“Where our language suggests a body

and there is none: there we should like to say,

is a spirit.”

--Wittgenstein, Philosophical Imagination

All the awkward fumbling I perform
When my Muse is far away

Months since I’ve touched her hair,
Risen to her voice, felt her wet breaths

Against my face. Then, as if in
Answer to the tightness of my lament

The wind kicks up in the darkness
Outside, stirring dead October leaves

Along a black driveway
Making them rush down to the street

And back up again: calisthenics
For a lethargic imagination.

TROUBLE AT THE BUDDHA'S ALTAR

I endeavor to follow the Path
of the Buddha. Centering Being on a steady rhythm

of breaths, practicing patience and resignation to Powers greater than myself. But then

you send out word
of a future meeting between us

sure to involve so much more than
minds and spirits, rekindling all those secular

diversions, what the inside of your mouth tastes like pressed against mine, lifting us so far

from the quiet repose of bodies at perfect rest that the Buddha throws up his ancient arms

in weary frustration as I surrender
to a whole different set of breathing priorities.

KNOCKING ON YOUR DOOR

Our time together came to resemble
less the raging cataract it was
than a strong, steady stream in spring, a place where I am comfortable
swimming naked, although always
alert to potential undertow.

Those Saturday afternoons
when I would forgo my usual exercise routine in favor of exercising with you.
The mere proximity to your door
enough to set my heart adrift in white water; then, the excruciating wait for you to answer as though each of my arrivals came as a surprise your hair a mussed up-lift nest of blond one eye lined with mascara, the other not; one shoe on, the other buried in cluttered closet. Only a lover would remember
such indelicate details—not to skewer
your half-hearted apologies,
but to confess savoring this wondrous
incompletion: pupa caught in transit
from chrysalis to glory,
catching you half-dressed
on your way to undressed.

LILACS

my world is leaking faith these days
there are no more life boats since
yours drifted away and my eyesight
requires glasses just to write this page the smell of lilacs however demands
neither belief nor vision to sustain
only the sweet dream of its own creation not for long do they bloom
purple raspberry and blue
before dissipating into the ubiquitous
green of spring leaving
those two delicious weeks in May
when the air once wore the same perfume as the back of your neck

SPRING PLANTINGS

Beset, we are, with the urge to solve
too many problems, and then all at once. Let's choose instead
to go one at a time. On this
clear-eyed spring afternoon
I am reduced and elevated both
by the solution to one problem:
the time and space still separating us.

I wouldn't dare be so intrusive
were it not for the crocuses sprouting
pink and blue, the buds cracking open,
like miniature fireworks off gray branches, and the girls in their tight white tank tops.

Everything is pushing up and out.
Winter, its dead, flea-riddled carcass
redolent of old fur
has hung around the house too long
burrowing in its black hole of sleep.

But today, the brown earth is so fragrant and warm awakening old desires abruptly new
the knowledge I won't be good for much
until you help me begin again
my own renewal,
those deep, urgent, rhythmic strokes
opening up, straightening out.

IF

If you were to walk with me into the country
along a deserted tree-lined road
the fingers of black limbs
poised like cracks against a seamless purple ceiling with deep piles of fresh snow on either side and if somewhere in the middle of this road I were suddenly to pull you close to me your surprise measured in our silver breaths blending as I slipped inside
your winter overcoat lifting you up
to my mouth
until the tips of your thin boot heels
left the earth completely
your red lips chilled by the night air
would instantly warm

THE MASSAGE

Tucked inside its own envelope
candle-lit room floats above
November-darkened street. Inside,
warmed oils and scented creams
massage this body that should hold
very few mysteries. Yet, tonight,
it feels new to me—not strange or foreign even in this dim light—but
different, as though the individual
parts belonged to some other
woman, not my lover.
I am here committed to places

where lovers seldom linger:
stretching hamstrings and kneading
shoulder muscles, applying steady pressure to the soles of size 8 feet,
so smoothly elegant when I view them
inside your boots and stilettos,
but naked, surprisingly hard, calloused, complex. Time unfolds
your body unwinds and opens. You have more secrets yet to reveal as you gradually unlock under the caress of my greasy, laboring fingers, a yellow flower in the dusk, slowly
shedding workday toils, like pedals
dropping off against summer rain.

QUIET TABLE BY THE DOOR

Who knew what would accrue
from a steady diet of Friday night pizza and beer as we tried to ignore
our collective children high on carbonated fructose terrifying patrons at the restaurant that is no longer a restaurant. Who knew our surreptitious glances and flirtations, like assembling an airplane in mid-flight, would turn into this durable
craft, sailing beyond the reach of suitors and the accumulation of years. Who knew when everything in this world collapses and burns that we were building
something that would not,
and even as our children
take flight from us now, one by one,
into these adults we barely recognize,
what lust rises up immutably
sitting across from you
at a quiet table by the door.

TONY MAGISTRALE was born in Buffalo, New York. He received a B.A. from
Allegheny College, M.A. and PhD from the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently Professor and Chair of the English Department at the University of Vermont. He has also taught at the Breadloaf Young Writers Conference and has served as a Visiting Professor at the University of Augsburg, Germany. His book of poems, What She Says About Love, won the 2007 Bordighera Poetry Prize and was subsequently published in 2008 as a
bilingual edition by the Bordighera Press and the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute at City University of New York. Magistrale lives in South Burlington, Vermont, with his wife, Jennifer, two sons, and a golden retriever.