I want to read some new poems.
You publish a book and it takes so
long to get the thing done around, accepted and out.
And the rest that you could just--
poof.
Funny.
Because if you're lucky, if you're lucky,
things are in motion.
So I don't know.
I don't know what I'm gonna do here.
I'm going to read a few of these.
There's a real loose.
There's a loose thing.
There's a loose narrative poem.
This is set in South Philadelphia.
People, they ask me questions about what was it
like to grow up there, to see blah blah and these subjects,
all this stuff.
And I don't care about local poems.
All these poems that I wrote about,
people dying in South Philadelphia and whatnot.
When I was writing those poems, I
felt that I was writing poems about funerary rites.
You know?
And it just so happened that the material that
was given to me in my life to work with
happened to be these materials.
But the poems, to me, are as Greek as they are, located
in a particular modern place.
And this, too, which has something
to do with the nature of transmission
of stories in a tribe.
The title is "Christopher Columbus Park".
"Checkers, bocce, some days rummy or hearts,
early fall under chestnut trees.
Then winter, inside the rec center,
bingo and widows while snow dazes 8th Street's traffic
lights.
Summer, finally, Mikey and Sal warm themselves in beach chairs
on the grass.
Sticky sunshine, stoagies, Phillies
games cracking from transistors, the dago red
they drink from churchy cruets going up in smoke.
Some days, in pressed T-shirts, Sal
plays sweet potato, Mikey the mandolin,
bald heads nodding like tulips.
Why wasn't I surprised by its senselessness,
the word we use to justify what happened,
anything that happens, childhood friends at odds over money,
maybe, or baseball stats, the unions or Democrats, boiling
over as usual, nose to nose, blue in the face,
until, this one time, Mikey goes home and comes back
with his old kraut Luger.
And Sal starts to run, his crabby legs and arms,
grabbing for air, until he drops,
as if life were one small breath held and spanked.
While the pistol rabbits into the air from slow motion
Mikey's hand, who can't think fast enough to feel
his own heart failing him.
Their cronies couldn't help.
What was the fight about?
He never carried the gun.
The widows said bad blood, between old fools too
old to know bad blood was there.
One generation kept the story alive,
trying to make it make sense, then
it dried up and blew away, sticking to me.
But there's still no saying how the angers of a place
can live in us like love, thriving, terribly our own.
Any truth suffices.
Stories pass.
What matters is that comic image saved of two old running man
about to die."