Hymns & Hers
That’s how they mark the restroom doors here,
Hymns and Hers. When I was a kid this bar
was a funeral home. Prior that a foundry.
Frank J. Boyle cut the marble here and delivered
the headstones to the lithe grass of new plots
in Allegheny Cemetery not fifty steps
from this door. Later Boyle sold the land
to Wayne Brass who spit out metal castings
intently as you would tobacco juice and with the same
shimmery purl of pleasure too. Brass paid
no mind to the dead, simply shooed them away
like neighborhood dogs. Vernor Lutz had the place
as I remember it, buying the mortuary cleanly
off his brother-in-law. Lutz also owned Stephen
Foster’s old homestead on Penn Ave. Made that
a funeral home too. The dead have always been good
business. It would change hands again, shaking off
the Reagan years as Good Funeral Home and Cremation
Service. A man called Bainhauer said the spot had some
beautiful stained glass and some antique-type items
that really kinda added to the overall décor. Eventually
the joint became what it is just like all the rest of us did.
But all the fresh paint in the world and a good-looking
bartender can’t change the view from my stool. Acres
and acres of the dead waiting waiting waiting.
September 17, 1862
The Battle of Antietam takes place two hundred
miles from here one hundred and sixty-two
years from here where nearly eighty
young women and girls
oh so carefully made cartridges here
for the battle-blown Union and instantly
were incinerated here exploded
in the Allegheny Arsenal here spilled
gunpowder ignited by the spark
of a horse shoe on this rough road here
custom and inadequate language
cut into the stone a terrible memento
to the heedless endless now here.
Millvale
Leaving the wreck of the last year and the year before that
and one more besides behind I come here
for an hour in the sun drinking beer and watching
the neighborhood dogs, attending to the stream
swelling with run-off and the fervent applause
of the water, the early March sky a slightly bleached-out
kind of blue, and this much too loud music I try
to shut out preferring to focus on the bass thump
of blood touring the backwaters of my middle-aged body.
My wife has the kids and God, so I hear, is in His heaven.
Rumor has it this is where my father ran aground
when he abandoned us. Here across the Allegheny
smack dab in the flood line. Eventually he moved on—
Florida, Ireland, Ohio from what I gather.
A more lonely trajectory I cannot imagine. Today
everyone here seems to know one another
and the beer in our veins can only sing of love.
The sun in our squinting eyes making every homely face
a thing of near-impossible beauty.
We Can’t All Be Walt Whitman
for Lori Jakiela
The old Italian men are out here again swapping
cards across the smoke-stained table tying up
the sidewalk with their loose tongues
and roaming eyes, their laughter overtakes
the hissing espresso machine inside La Prima,
turns the heads of strangers. I want to love these men,
but I do not. I want to love the slow-moving crowd,
the families in from the suburbs buying bootleg t-shirts
and drooping roses, the drunks cheerfully pissing
themselves outside Lefty’s, but I do not. Instead, they invite
anger into my heart and that makes me worry. Lori, when
I think the word compassion I think of you. When
I think drinking beer after beer all night and into the early
morning hours is a great idea I often wish you were here
to say Yes and Have you read so-and-so and I’ve been
writing new poems. We can’t all be Walt Whitman, I know.
But that you are out there in Trafford loving your children
and Newman, taking the time to check in with so many
of us who need checking in on I know that it is possible
to get close to what we all want to believe Whitman was—
someone who understood we were all beautiful and worthy
in our way, that even in all our awfulness there is something
bright and shining to salvage.
