Perfunctory, but adhering to decorum and required niceties.

I played my part according to the script,

Eschewing the opportunity to ad-lib denials and denunciations

(What are a few more lies in a life already marred

By hundreds, perhaps thousands of others?)

Choosing instead to mouth the words used by scores before me

Indicting oneself for trespasses against state and party

And accepting the judgment of my peers

(For we are, to the last man, all peers now.)

I might have, I suppose, returned to my roots, as it were,

Some small, dark flat in some banlieue ouvriere,

An angry young man mellowing into conservative curmudgeonry,

But sometimes a full stomach can be every bit disorienting as hunger,

Convincing one he is doing the work of the masses

Long after it is obvious that neither he nor they have any clue

As to what such a vocation might actually entail.

You may as well ask a flower to return underground,

To that dark earth rife with the excrement of worms and dead seed pods.

I have no intention of being rousted at some near-future pre-dawn,

To be dragged like some bewildered calf through dewy scrub grass

In order to be haphazardly blindfolded and thrown against a wall;

I will leave at a moment of my own choosing

(The guards will facilitate my undertaking, as most of them

Engage in a tidy little side business as emissaries

To those who choose to book their own passage to the other side.

One cannot blame them—they do what they must to get by.)

You may take it as one last dereliction of duty,

One final missed opportunity to exhibit some trace of valor.

All well and good, then; having once held the club,

I have no appetite for assuming the role of the doomed bovine

Trotting the final steps of the ramp leading to the abbatoir.

Whose wizened visage spoke of unwise choices.

He spoke wistfully (though apropos of nothing) of an abandoned diner

Near the terminus of a truncated and decommissioned road,

Its parking lot an unhappy armistice of cracked tarmac and scrub grasses,

The building still sporting caricatures of the proprietors

(The artist a devotee of the Bob’s Big Boy school),

Though time had robbed them of the odd eyeball,

And a shoulder or elbow had faded surreptitiously into the background.

Much of a large sign remained as well, appearing to be nothing less

Than some leviathan’s abandoned crossword puzzle,

Fairly shouting “THE B ST STE K BETW N SYR C SE AND OT T WA

OR Y UR MON Y B CK!” Nothing else remained, my companion intimated,

Save the odd abandoned farmhouse and vestigial fields,

With long unmended barbed-wire fences doing their level best

To contain the ghosts of bygone and unmourned cows.

They’d thought the place would be a gold mine.

These words came (wholly unbidden, not that it mattered to their originator)

Courtesy of the lone regular in this frowzy, nondescript Upstate bar

Attached, more or less, to an equally unhappy motel

Where two or three of us, consigned to stools by a capricious wind

Which had dredged up all the Lake Ontario moisture it could carry

Before dumping it in implacable white bands over this particular bit of interstate,

Seemed fated to call home sweet home for the evening.

The “gold mine” in question, we came to find out,

Was a small country store located in some approximation of a hamlet

Known as Blodgett Mills (we inferred, though it was not said as much,

That it was just down the road a piece, as such places usually are.)

What inspired such confidence in our new-found friend’s parents

Had not been readily apparent at the time,

Nor had the passage of time (and it was difficult to pinpoint

How old our unfortunate speaker may have been,

His visage subjected to weathering and wuthering

By forces that spoke more to the quality of his years than the quantity)

Served to clarify matters–he supposed they thought the forlorn little ski bowl

Up toward Virgil would, through some means of enchantment, become profitable,

Or maybe they’d heard whispers that the truck factory up in Cortland

Was planning to expand to some nearby abandoned farmland.

Hell, he all but spat, they probably got hold of the fool notion

They could make the place a go by hard work and force of will.

It had not worked out that way, of course; the combined encumbrances

Of hundred-hour weeks and skating upon the edge of bankruptcy

Had taken his father before he turned fifty, and his mother,

Rushed closer to the precipice through the addition of grief and guilt,

Soon followed him to the ranks of the choir invisible.

The son had no intent of taking the reins– place was no more

Than a fucking oversize coffin to me–nor could he find anyone

Who appreciated its limitless commercial possibilities,

And the bank did its due diligence shortly afterward.

The store had been vacant for years, perhaps decades at this point.

Place’s still there, our narrator assured us, winders ‘r busted up pretty good,

‘Cept meetin’ a girlfriend or takin’ a piss out of folks’ line of view.

He’d said all he had to say, and so the bar was quiet

(The tiny and occasionally reliable TV showed the unhappy Doppler images

With the sound off) save for snatches of the bartender’s conversation

With a teenage son or daughter who was being advised

That mom wasn’t going to make it home tonight

So the place better goddamn well be just as she left it

And the constant growl of the winds driving the squalls

Which obscured a billboard up on the highway

Touting the impending if indeterminate opening

Of a resort on a man-made lagoon sanguinely named Hope Lake.

It announces itself with fanfare and hullabaloo,

All but taking out a three-column ad in the trades

To trumpet its arrival.

Its métier has always been the dimly-lit corner,

The whispered admonition, the ramshackle room

In a somewhat undesirable neighborhood,

And while it is certain that it accompanied us

As we emerged from the sea, it did so

On a light unsullied by moonlight, silently surfacing

With the least desirable of piscine attributes in tow.

More monsters–people like to be scared, as if those callow youngsters,

Growing up with their two cars in the garage and three sets at the country club,

Their fraternity mixers at Whittier or Occidental,

Knew the first damn thing about terror.

Still, they wanted me to grind out the harum-scarum hokum

They enjoyed watching two-reelers on Saturday afternoons

While men were doing hard work in Leyte and Manila,

As if the transitory fear of some ghoulish bogeyman

Would last through the thirty-second epics

Featuring some cartoon bear shilling for beer

Or bunnies extolling the virtues of toilet paper.

Let me tell you what fear is, I would say time and again,

It’s a padlocked fence and a smokestack

Because you can’t do a damn thing about it

And these promising young men would just look at me

Like I was some poorly made-up extraterrestrial

From one of their Buck Goddamn Rogers potboilers.

Several of my neighbors here were among the men, mostly boys in truth,

Who marched with the 126th New York, taking fire

At Petersburg and The Wilderness, at Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor.

We have spoken about the horrors of war,

The kaleidoscope of confusion and dread,

Where no direction leads to shelter, no road guides the way to home.

They have said that, as frightening as the sound of the minie balls,

Zipping overhead like malevolent flies, and the cannon were,

What they found truly awful was the manner in which those fields,

So like the ones where they had flushed out squirrel and quail as children,

Became foreboding nightmares, containing a dark madness

That they never dreamed could have existed.

She glanced at her cell phone, for the third time in the last five minutes or so, to check the time. “Probably stuck behind some fucking logging truck”, she grumbled, the way she bit off the words showing a growing frustration with the intractability of time and narrow, winding two-lane roads. They were sitting at a makeshift bus shelter outside of the vacant storefront where the Rexall pharmacy used to be (the shelter itself simple plywood covering a bench, ostensibly a temporary measure until the village constructed a permanent one, although it had been there some three years) waiting for the bus that would take her to Pittsburgh–hopefully in time to get her to the airport and a flight to Denver, where she was to begin a new job (a contracting gig, she was always quick to point out; she would be home for Christmas, most likely, certainly by Easter). He had originally planned to drive her to the airport, but his Subaru wagon, ancient though normally dependable (he’d bought it because his friend who worked at the newspaper over in St. Mary’s had said it was the vehicle of choice for paper carriers, all of whom swore it was virtually indestructible) had picked an inopportune time to give up the ghost, and it was now sitting at Yose’s Garage up in Wilcox awaiting either repair or a dignified burial, so they’d been forced to lug suitcases the three-quarters of a mile down Market Street to await the bus, which was apparently moving at a leisurely crawl somewhere between Kane and Montmorenci Falls.

“So what are you going to do now?” she asked, which he knew was code for Why are you staying around this dump? What’s here that isn’t in Denver?, but he decided that it wasn’t the time or place to re-hash an argument they’d already had too many times, so he simply said “Dunno for sure. I’m on the sub list at the middle school. Maybe I’ll try to get a job up at the mill or the refinery in Bradford if things pick up.” She rolled her eyes and shook her head, and gave a brief, dismissive snort, but thankfully left it at that. He’d never had (in her view, at least) a particularly good answer for why he’d decided to stay behind; he’d talked on and on about how a place becomes part of you– the sounds and the languid pace of life in these never-quite-boom towns, the dull roar of the mill punctuated by the strident, discordant whistles denoting the shift change at seven, three, and eleven, the manner in which in the elk, re-introduced onto the hillsides by the game and wildlife people, had survived and improbably, almost magically, prospered–but the sentences came out all jumbled up and chaotic, which invariably brought her to a purple-faced rage. More than once, she shouted at him You’ve said yourself that’s the kind of romantic bullshit that helped kill your father. You’re not going to be happy until it kills you, too? Invariably, he’d had little to say in response, save for occasionally grunting Well, I can’t help it if words are no damn good sometimes.

She shivered as she sat on the bench, tucked back as far as possible toward the plywood to keep out of the wind. “You watch–it’ll snow enough today to cover the ground” (they had, on the walk down, seen the odd flurry wander aimlessly earthward and disappear on the sidewalk), and he found himself on the cusp of saying Yes, but the sun’ll come out, and the snow will melt into little gems of wetness, and you know it will warm up enough where we get that little bit of haze mixing in with the smoke from the mill which’ll make the place look like goddamn Brigadoon, but he caught himself at the last moment. In the end, he just took her hands between his and said “Well, this time of year it’ll never stick around, anyhow.”

As a just reward for treachery and traitorousness.

Indeed, nothing could be farther from the truth;

Most of my compatriots her have blindly hitched their fortunes

To some flag, some shining dogma, our fates sealed

By the unwillingness to be sufficiently self-interested,

The refusal to abandon ship once it became apparent

That the experience upon the rocks

Would be neither enabling nor ennobling

My own case is illustrative of the rule;

My father, that noble sovereign

Ascending to the throne via parlor tricks

And the rustic embrace of folk legend,

The fornication resulting in my birth brushed aside

As some accident of mistaken identity or enchantment,

Is celebrated, beatified really, in song and legend,

Yet I, who pulled myself up by my own bootstraps as it were,

Winning his queen’s hand and defeating him on the field,

Am consigned here in perpetuity, suffering demons

Who hiss Bastard! and Usurper!

As they put my through my paces

(One takes their rebukes with a grain of salt;

They are all mad, the likely result of dealin

With the glut of madmen here.)

As I noted, the presence of myself and my brethren in this place

Serve as a testament to the merits of fidelity,

Which we often commemorate (I confess it seems a touch silly,

But the necessity of creating distractions

When one is pestered constantly

For such a period as time is still time) by staging caucus races,

Where each participant addresses the asshole in front of him directly,

Paying it fealty–My liege! My liege!–

Which is answered in turn

By a cannonade of noxious farting

(We assume the smells to be offensive,

As the atmosphere here is somewhat deleterious at all times),

All to the great amusement of those sprites observing our machinations,

They in turn guffawing madly and urinating downward upon us

While we, as the acidic waste corrodes us,

Also cackle like lunatics,

Fairly shouting Ah, the gentle rain of Heaven!

Thank you, my Lord!

Though, oddly enough, our laughter at times

Seems somewhat more restrained.

What with the way all the lots on their street,

Once part of the old Revolutionary War tracts, great broad squares

Haphazardly cut through any number of sub-divisions and surveyor’s mis-markings

Into narrow slivers, all odd angles and uneven sides,

Like some pie carved by an ancient and unsteady baker,

Yet each spring his missus added another curve by the walk to the front porch,

Or rounded out some corner she’d cut back by the scrubby old apple trees

(Those really needing to come down as well, just another reason for the deer

To wander into the yard and take out the hollies once they’d finished off

The few gnarled and sour offerings the trees in question presented),

A few inches here, a foot there, of turf given over to her plantings

At the cost of a couple fewer straight rows

For the ancient, heavy John Deere push-mower to navigate.

Still, he couldn’t deny that she could work the next best thing to miracles

On that rocky soil, especially since she worked exclusively with wildflowers:

Asters, chicory, day lilies, phlox, bellflowers, ironweed which would flourish

Clear into November–not a store-bought bloom among them,

And always sure to generate some comment from Alice Finch-Barker next door,

All pinched nose and pursed lips, along the lines of That’s quite lovely, dear,

If you’re fond of the railroad-bed gardening kind of thing,

As if buying a tray of impatiens or pansies was the height of haute couture.

She was taken away, and all that came to an end.

The wildflowers were muddled up with and soon overwhelmed

By the Queen Anne’s Lace and goldenrod,

The outlines of the beds less perceptible each year,

Until one late April he decided to fix up the garden (though he wouldn’t have said

It was a conscious decision as much as a notion that letting the garden go so

Wasn’t right, and that notion had simmered to the point

Where he’d had to do something about it), and so he’d dug and swore,

And appropriated such flora from roadsides and railbeds as needed

Until the old plots were reasonable approximations of what they’d been.

His children and neighbors were a bit worried by the transformation;

It was good to see him take an interest, certainly,

But he worked at the sowing and the transplanting

With something approaching a frenzy,

Clomping around back roads at the height of July days

Where cooler heads would have sat on the porch with an ice tea,

Reading a book and scratching an old dog behind the ears,

And, as Ms. Finch-Barker would tell all and sundry,

It’s not like he’s a child any more, no matter how much he acts like one.

For his part, he said little about his new-found passion,

Save for occasionally grunting Shame to let things go to rack and ruin,

Always with one eye seemingly cast

Toward the dark patch of dark green scrub pines at the back of the property

Which seemed to inch closer to the house every winter.

A certain set of the jaw, a steeliness to the gaze,

Which to some spoke of an admirable duty to King, country, and honor,

But to those who have seen it too often before

More an indication of mania, the pursuit of an unholy grail for its own sake.

Understand, we’d lived that before–crawling like infants

Through razor wire and enfilade,

All to possess a few meters of muck so sodden

That sappers in the trenches had drowned

In an infernal mixture of a mousse of French sludge and their own excrement,

(I have never found it fit to complain about the Fokker–sized mosquitoes of July

Or five-below in January since) all so the Bosch,

Having emerged like roaches or rats from their pillboxes,

Could reclaim it scant days later, so when Haig decided to punch that dance card

Yet once more, they said Currie (no firebrand by any measure)

Actually yelled– Not these boys! Not for this patch of mud!

It was in vain, of course; there is no greater folly

Than to argue with a man in the full grip of an unhallowed passion.

The results were predictable: harried mothers dropping off juniors

Who had never known senior at school,

Prairie farms shorthanded by two or three sons,

A battle which changed nothing, a state funeral for a field marshal.

We veterans have been asked–often, mind you—-to lend name and purse

To the establishment of a monument on or near that ill-fated ground.

Invariably, I politely (but firmly) decline;

I cannot picture some noble bronze figure marching bravely across that field

(As if anyone traversed those fields upright!) or some subdued plaque

Appropriately commemorating what transpired outside that tiny village.

There are any number of perfect apt memorials already there:

Odd, out-of-place pot-bunkers and moraines

Which still dot the landscape, some sporting bandages of grasses and blooms,

And when the machinations of nature

Have finally smoothed and leveled the ground,

Those who feel the need to memorialize what came to pass there

Will be long since dead, and likely for the best,

For those proposed cenotaphs would be testament

To no more than the grim realization

That our generation was no more able to conquer madness

Than any who had preceded our succeeded our own.

Indeed, I have often seen boys playing shinny on the ponds

(More than a few of whom had fathers or brothers fall on that forsaken turf)

Raise up their sticks as fire them into the air at some unseen antagonist,

And I have wondered to myself What was it all for, Lord?

What for?

And had, almost jokingly at first but all but grimly later on,

Bought any number of children’s toys–dolls and plastic soldiers,

Baseball bats and tea sets, footballs and fancy dresses–and one brother-in-law

Saw fit, though it was never apparent if through sympathy or sheer malice,

To give them one such toy each anniversary, including (on what he termed

Their lucky thirteenth) a plastic, hideously leering rocking horse,

Miniature approximation of some merry-go-round phantasm

Whose springs creaked shrilly, almost desperately–not unlike the manner

Their own bedsprings wailed in the frantic, forlorn pursuit of child-bearing.

That year, there was a son, and, as with all children,

There were toys that were ignored, others played with once or twice

To then be discarded without afterthought,

Still others enjoyed for weeks or even months at a stretch;

And then there was the rocking horse.

Indeed, boy and horse were nearly inseparable,

Even well after he had entered school,

Having reached a point where he was too old and too large for the toy,

He would not hear of giving it up, the one or two semi-forcible attempts

To take it away engendering reaction bordering on the violent,

And, anyway, the school psychologist had reasoned

That it was more something to be watched than worried about,

But when he rode the toy, hunched oddly,

Twined about it like an uncomfortable ivy,

He would narrate actual races–not epic deeds,

No grand recounts of the Secretariats or Man O’ Wars

Riding to great victories at Churchill Downs or Saratoga;

Invariably, the horse in question would run nobly, gamely,

But finish somewhere in the middle of the pack,

Perhaps third if he was feeling inordinately giddy,

But never a win, never a great yoke of roses or carnations

Hanging around the steed’s neck.

Eventually, as with all things childish, this all passed,

(Though the horse remained in his room as long as he did)

And the boy went on to a middling college, a solid job, a happy family.

The toys begotten of so many unrewarded years and unanswered hopes

Found their way into any number of Salvation Army donations

And garage sales, though at one of those

A young woman had eyed and picked up the horse,

But his mother had walked over and said,

As she more or less gently wrested the toy away,

I’m sorry, but we’re saving that for someone.