no matter how hard it rained.
Beneath the handlebar mount, it said royal in red letters
unscathed despite the elements;
this was the bicycle’s first lesson,
to be royal and unscathed—
I pressed my ear-cup to the welds.
Pedal furiously, then coast in silence.
You will need teeth to grab the chain.
Exhortations with the stringent priggishness of Zen,
delivered by a guru who hauls you off and wallops you
in answer to your simple question.
Though its demise is foggy,
I can conjure with precision its rebukes, the dull sting
when the boy-bar bashed my private place.
Then no talking was permitted
beyond one stifled yelp.
You could, however, rub the wound
with the meat of your thumb — so long
as you did this stealthily, pretending you had an itch.
Amphicar
Amphicar rolls across the breakfast table
as the happy family plunges into the river—
don’t worry. I’ve just trolled them from the river
of human news. Today’s lifestyle feature:
this convertible that once topped my desires,
all my crackpot desires
(my parents would not buy one to drive the filthy current).
Instead we rode a station wagon into our oblivion,
when we could have ridden into our oblivion
with the means of rescue. In the famous myths
how many souls got banished to the underworld
(or turned into trees, their arms the branches whorled)
and were doomed because they let themselves be driven
over death’s river (or into the tree)
without a plan for their re-entry
into living human form? In my actual river I never stepped down
because, the myth went, its bottom was shit,
and when the mayor confessed it was actual shit
the world proved itself to be a sluice of lies
even if the water was blue
or sort of blue.
Amphicar would have wheeled right through it,
manufactured ’61 through ’68, the years of my youth
(my banished-to-the-back-of-the-station-wagon youth),
with no propeller or white leather seats,
no top rolled down, no fishing pole slanting up.
No one listened to me: how we could just drive up
on the shores of Hell, and tan on that beach for a while.
If we only had an Amphicar. Then when we grew sick for home
we could have crossed back home.
Job Site, 1967
Brick laid down, scritch of the trowel’s
downward stroke, another brick set
then the flat side of the trowel moving
across the top of the course of bricks.
My father stepped from the car in his brown loafers,
the rest of him is fading but not his loafers,
the round spot distended by his big toe.
Brick laid down, scritch of the trowel’s
downward stroke, the silver bulb of the door lock
sticking up as I sat in the car,
the kid in the dress. Newark burned
just over the river, not so far south
as the South of their skin — deepening
under the ointment of sweat, skin and sweat
they’d hauled from the South
brother by brother and cousin by cousin
to build brick walls for men like my father
while Newark burned, and Plainfield burned,
while the men kept their rhythm, another brick set,
then the flat side of the trowel moving
across the top as my father crossed the mud.
I sat in the car with the silver bulb of the door lock
sticking up, though I was afraid,
the kid in the dress, the trowel moving
across the top of the course of bricks.
You can’t burn a brick,
you smashed a brick through a window,
the downward stroke, another brick set,
but to get the window first you needed a wall,
and they were building the wall,
they were building the wall
while my father, in his brown loafers,
stepped toward them with their pay.
Wormhole Theory
Mario Perillo has died, call him Mr. Italy—
and I regret never having gone sightseeing
in a bus marked PERILLO TOURS.
He was no relative of mine,
all that connects us is the name:
this foldout plastic promotional rain hat
someone handed me at birth.
An accident of the alphabet: can’t say
I haven’t craved a more streamlined form — sometimes
you get tired of being Lucia Perillo
and want to slide by, without ripping the ether
with all your cognominal barbs and hooks.
Anthony DiRenzo, my old cubicle-mate,
went by the name of Mr. Renz—
a truncation that once caused my scorn to sputter forth,
though now I see: the burden of the vowels.
First there’s the issue of the sonic clang
and next there’s the issue of our guilt,
that we’ve strayed onto turf where we don’t belong,
so far from the outer-borough homelands
of shoe repair and autobody shops.
This is the guilt Verdi captures in his aria
“Di Provenza il mar,” which Anthony sang
one night in our empty basement office
while snow spread its hush money two floors above.
Alfredo’s father is begging him to come home,
to abandon the floozy he picked up in Paris—
if he waits a hundred years, he can hop
aboard Mario’s red-and-green tour bus
in time for the cocktail hour, perhaps,
with honeydew melon served the way I love it:
wrapped in the paper-thin slices of fat
that choked my father’s heart.
Sometimes a name seems our most arbitrary possession,
and sometimes it seems like the grain in a rock
like a sculptor’s hunk of Italian marble: whack it
and you might get either your first glimpse of a saint
or a pile of rubble. Now Mario P.
has entered my obituary book
facing Lucia Pamela, another tour guide of sorts,
having recorded her album on the moon
after flying there in her pink Cadillac.
One nutty broad, Mario would say: A real fruity-patootie—
whose off-key canzone-ing would plink in my ears
way too unsweetly this time of the morning
as Verdi holds forth through the hi-fispeakers
with another (true story) Lucia-of-the-vowels
singing the role of Alfredo’s beloved slut.
In my own flights of grandeur, I am a wormhole
connecting the Roman Empire to outer space,
joining the Old World to the dogs on the moon—
however crudely my name has roughed me in.
In my hometown, Perillos were common as shrubs,
a tribe in white lipstick and lamb-chop sideburns,
such as worn by the one who spirited me to the docks
in the spaceship of his Nova. He even wore
my dad’s middle name, and I bet the vortex of his lips
meeting mine would have ripped the cosmic silk
or caused a galactic cymbal crash. Or blown
the head gasket of the space-time bus: