FIRST LINES AT THE LAST MILE

There is a book club made up of guys who drink at The Last Mile. They meet off-premises around the corner in the brick apartment block, first floor. I can’t name the guys now — it’s a guy’s group, ladies invited(occaionally a few will go and enjoy it) . And its held in Ronnie Belecavitch’s apartment. It’s the apartment where his Lithuanian parents lived until the day they died. They meet on a Monday night. I stopped by once and heard them talking about From Here to Eternity. It was interesting hearing Sticky Sammartino elaborate on the interaction of war and memory and rememberiing a cousin of his who was at Schofield Barracks when the Japanese attacked.

But I drove by the Mile one night and saw cars parked nearby with bumper stickers that were tributes to the value of poetry. I parked and, very curious, went in the side door, saw Deano at the bar (working a night shift for a change) and he smiled and I went up to the bar and he said this guy Balin came in one night with a bunch of other guys, a rarified, arty kind of group of the kind that occaisonally search out The Mile for its underground reputaiton has a captivatingly obscure dive. No one, including Deano, knows exactly know where they come from — and nobody felt like asking them. They were welcome as the flowers in May, as is anybody who wants to stop by the Mile.

It was also nice seeing fresh blood out at those tables. I didn’t want to scare them off. They all, according to Deano, had ordered some serious drinks and on this night, they were having a ‘first line’ contest. This much I know because I asked.

Deano was, as always (in the tradition of good bartenders) affectingly indifferent and accepting of the newcomers, but telling me, “I don’t know first lines or last lines — or the first thing about poetry except maybe, “roses are red, violets are blue…”

“‘There, that’s a first line,” I said. “Go over and join them. You’d fit right in. It’s a slow night. I’ll mind the bar for you.”

“Thank. And no thanks,” Deano said. Among the absurdities of all I said was the idea that I could run the bar for him.

First Line Contest’,” I mused out loud. “Interesting. You gotta know your poetry to know random first lines.”

No doubt abut that, Deano agreed. Kind of like people who know baseball statistics.

Turns out they come in every Monday night. I guess it kinds of gives a little touch of flavor to the drab start of the week.

“They drink, they spout poetry,” Dean said, “I hear ’em over here. They get louder, like all drinkers, the more they drink. I hope nobody decides somebody’s cheating and starts a brawl.”

We laughed at that. I saw a Boston Herald headline: POETIC PUNCH FEST IN FAMOUS REVERE WATERING HOLE. (By the way, Deano told me somebody was doing some research and found out the Mile is actually partly in East Boston. I’ve got to look into that.)

Somebody sitting near the table came up to the bar with the last remnants of their hamburger and had overheard the ground rules — whoever identifies the first line get to takes a drink. “They’re getting good and warm over there, he said.

Otherwise it was an ordinary night at The Last Mile.

Deano swabbed the bar. A few guys were watching the Red Sox up on the Sanyo flat screen over the bar. They were over toward the front window by the red glow of the Rolling Rock neon sign facing the street and fairly close to the front door. They sat where the polished oak bar curves, a world away from poetry.

The poetry guys were along the back wall betwen the juke box and up against Knox’s Last Mile mural (which, when they weren’t concentrating on poetry, drew the interest of a few of these arty patrons. I was wondering where Knox was hiding. Probably upstairs in his apartment/studio. He’d have liked this bunch.)

I sat down on a bar stool and Deano, without my asking for it, served me up a cup of black coffee. I heard the knit-cap guy blurt out a first line. He had a gray beard and the knit cap was crunched down on his head, strands of gray hair poking out from under it. He appeared to be the ring master I was suddenly surmising that these guys must come from Cambridge — and this knit-cap guy must be the guy named Balin.)

“I have four poems for you, ” he said to the gathering, “all part of a sequence. ” There were — I counted — seven guys.

“First of the first lines,” the guy said, Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future…

“Perhap?,” shouted one fellow. “Why did the poet hedge his damn bets? Is it or isn’it it?”

“Two, said the poetic interlocutor, ignoring the guy and going on. In my beginning is my end.

“Well, there’s a short life,” said some guy with a decided South Asian accent and a giant pilsner of beer in front of him. “Some little bugger squirting out of the womb only to expire.”

“Shut up,” said a short African-American guy. You’re getting disrespectful — and bloody stupid.”

“Three,” our man went on, I don’t know much about gods but I think the river is a strong brown god.

“Old Man River,” offered a guy wearing a scalley cap and, in contrast to everyone else I was hearing, manifesting a strong Boston accent.

“And Four,” said the man, ignoring that guy, too, and pausing for dramatic effect like they do on trivia night, which they don’t have at The Last Mile. (And I was thinking, is this the dawn of a unique kind of high-minded trivia night?

“Four, the guy said, for an even deeper effect, Midwinter spring is its own season.

“And sadly past,” said someone.

“Now, said the main guy in his knit cap, standing at the head of the table. “These beginning are the beginnings of poems in a famous cycle.”

“Too easy,” said one guy.

“Beginning to end,” said another wag.

I didn’t wait for the big reveal. I was back on the street and getting into my car, a bit of an ocean nip in the air. I remembered from reading it and liking it in English class in high school that the first poem ends in a neat inversion”

“In my end is my beginning.”

So much for beginnings and endings. As I came out front of the Mile, I saw the nurses going in, those regulars.

I wonder if any of them know any poetry. I know one of them once told me she tended to a dying man who’s last words to her were, “the fire and the rose are one.”

Maybe, if she and the girls sit close to that table, she’d finally find out how those words wound up on the lips of a dying man who was obviously also a dyed-in-the-wool lover of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.

THE GIRL AT THE FESTIVAL

Knox, the artist, sitting at the far end of the bar at The Last Mile Lounge (it’s his usual perch), drinking coffee for a change — bad coffee, he’d say — feels a breeze at his back. The side door has flung open. A breeze alright, a spring chill. More like a wind has blown the door open on the screen door. Deano, the bartender, goes to close it.

“No,” says Knox. ” Leave it.” He’s turned on his stool, hands on his knees. “The sun is out. It’s spring. “

The wind won’t last, I’m thinking. Meanwhile, the open door has shed some light in the dark lounge.

There’s no such thing as May wind, one would think –not usually. You think of April as windy. But here’s a May wind. And I’m thinking: let’s just enjoy it, just as Knox is thinking…it probably the only wind out there. Knox seems to read my thoughts. He says, “it’s probably already blowing out to sea. Farewell, May wind.”

Everybody thought about that. Goodbye to a fortuitous wind, shedding light, stirring spring sensibilities. Not an ill-wind, far from it.

“It’s coming in the middle of things, too” Knox says. He meant the middle of the month. Indeed! It was May fifteenth.

“This isn’t just any month,” says Knox. “It’s the month of May.”

Somehow, we all knew what he meant — about May. He turns on his stool to look at us all.

“I’m thinking and seeing visions, my friends, and I’m seeing Spring….Spring flowers — girls. Why, I knew a girl who was born on this date. May Fifteen. The exact beautiful middle of the month. Beautiful girl, too.”

He sang then.. (Yes, Knox sings occasionally, a nice tenor):

Beautiful girls….
Walk a little slower ….when you walk by me
Lingering sunsets…
Stay a little longer with the lon–ely sea…

Knox, absent any further lyrics he could recall from that number, settled into a little barroom oration….

“Frank Sinatra died on this date,too,” Knox said. “He sang that song from time to time — a song for somebody approaching the prime of their lives, or just past it. A time when you want to savor life….In fact, I heard Sinatra do it in Vegas, and it begins, the prologue of the song, anyway…”as I approach the prime of my life…” He wasn’t in great voice that night. He was well past his prime. “

I didn’t know Knox was such a Sinatra fan. I thought he went for opera. But our Sinatra moment was dying out, along with the wind. Then, ole blue eyes got a reprieve. Not many people at the Mile, middle of a Friday on a May afternoon (a few weekenders would come in after five) — but some guy got up, a guy nobody knew, dug down deep for a quarter and played ole Sinatra on the juke box. Frank was soon singing something that made it feel like spring was giving way to summer. I’ve heard so much Sinatra in my life, all those love songs run together. But it was good, just flowing out at us, that melody, those lyrics and melody that, believe it or not, I can’t recall.

“Too bad he never cut a song called “Spring Wind,” somebody said. For when the spring wind, comes blowin’ in from across Revere Beach…”

“Blowing candy wrappers, cigarette butts,pigeon feathers” somebody said, “right off the beach, right into my backyard. Beautiful!”

That was another guy, sitting by the door over his burger and beer. He was done eating, just sitting, thinking, obviously, thinking in real terms about real life. Who needs to think about real life in spring if you can avoid it? I didn’t know the guy. That’s when I realized we were all guys that afternoon –and, except for Deano and Knox and me — all strangers.

“Whatever,” came a voice. ” Wind like that, this time of the year, blows in memories,too, along with all the city junk.” This came from some guy by the other side door. That door was open. You could see out onto the sidestreet. From the way the new leaves on the few old trees out there were fluttering in the muted sunlight, I’d say that guy was feeling a wind at his back, too. Feeling that Spring Wind.

“That’s my thought,” he said, sitting over a glass of red wine. (I’ve got to like a guy who stops into a corner joint in the middle of the day just for a glass of wine. He must have been having memories.

“Don’t we always wish it would stay May?” I said. I was glad at that moment I’d stopped into The Mile. It was a good time and a good place to be having thoughts like that, which must have been what the guy with the wine was thinking.

And it was just about at that moment, that the whole mood and the memories shifted from wind to women — or girls. It started when Deano put a question to Knox.

“How old is that girl now?” Deano asked him, referring to the girl he’d known whose birthday it was. “Are they still — alive?”

“Don’t know,” Knox said. “She was nineteen when I knew her. She’d be seventy-seven now. Can’t picture that. She was lovely. Hope she’s still beautiful.”

“Depends on how you define beauty,” Deano said.

“She wasn’t your Maltese hairdresser, was she?” I asked. (Knox, as you may know, had told us this story of a Maltese hairdresser who broke his heart. He’d painted her portrait and it hung now on the corridor wall leading to the toilets. It’s still there, all marked up in antic ways.

“No,” Knox said. “No, this was another girl. Fresher. My girlfriend for a while.”

I guess Knox always had lots of girls on his mind, and, on this May day, lots of memories, but just one girl. He looked like he was seeing this one girl, this one old girlfriend, and he was going to paint her as soon as he got back upstairs in his studio — from his May memory.

“This one girl in particular, I dated for most of a year, Knox said, breaking the silence. “We met…. at The Festival.”

And that was the moment visions seemed to begin circulating like a floral aroma mingling with the odor of stale beer.

Everybody — there were maybe seven of us in the Mile — wondered, what festival Knox had in mind. Knox was well-traveled. It could have been anywhere in Europe, even eastern Europe, North Africa, Asia, anywher in the U.S.. But nobody asked. Yes, it was strange, but nobody asked — yet I’ll bet we all could see a festival somewhere in the world at that hour, ferris wheels turning, lights strung across the darkness, happily milling crowds wandering in an out of booths full of figurines or fruit in May sunlight — a festival going on somewhere in the world where it was night and moonlight — some festival in all our lives.

Just imagine seven guys with memories of a festival — with memories of a girl, one girl at that festival. Like Mangan’s daughter at the festival in Araby.

“We had a beautiful time at The Festival,” Knox said.

It was 2:01 p.m.. May 15, 2026 The middle of a spring month in the middle of our lives. There wasn’t a guy in the room under forty.

A roomful of silent middle-aged drinkers and dreamers after Sinatra has stopped singing — dreaming of a girl.

A girl like a vision, inside a vision of a Festival.

And music, we heard music, too. Not Sinatra, just music. Because another wind swept up the sidestreet and into both doors and like some Towar of Babel of music, each guy was hearing his own tune in this time in his life….

Or maybe no one heard it but me, though everybody seemed to be listening.

THE BUGGY GRAY BEAST OF MAY

May day. Gray days.

First there was May 1st, now, May 2nd, 2026

Twenty-eight days will follow (I pray, I truly pray)

Reminding me of what Macbeth, in a despairing mood, said:

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow…

Too bad. In May, I think of flowers. But here comes gray. Then there will be heat. We are in the middle of a drought here in the Tampa Bay area. So, with the gray, everyone is hoping there will come rain. No such luck.

There is both gray and sun today. Not sun. I prefer the gray.

‘Hello, Gray, my old friend…’

Seems like just yesterday I was saying hello to you.

You come slouching again, May, a rough beast this year, your hour come round at last

Time flies. And speaking of flies…

The lovebugs (Plecia neartica) are here, climbing the restaurant window. They fly conjoined, the female dragging the male who must walk backwards everywhere. And, like all insects, the female would seem to walk aimlessly. Which might explain why the male insect could care less. His fate is not going to be a happy one. He is dragged until the females lays her eggs, whereupon he dies.

The Myth of Sisyphus has nothing on the reality of the poor love bug. The mythical character pushes a rock only to have it roll back down the hill; the male lovebug has no worth life after mating — only to walk backwards and die.

Somedays, I feel like I’m walking backwards.

At least the female lovebug flies and takes the male with her. Do they both flutter their wings for maximum lift? Does the male get to tell the f emale, “hey, I’m sick of walking, this is pointless. Let’s take flight, babe.” (Can you hear Sinatra? “Come fly with me, come fly, come fly awayyyyy….”)

I wonder what they eat? Or do they just get eaten? (Can’t you just hear the male screaming, “hey, idiot, you’re headed right for that Toyota’s front grill!” Maybe in flight, he get to pull her around. But, as with all living things, the female’s probably the only one who knows where she’s going? But — where do they go, on land or in the air, that makes a damn bit of differnce. Do they have parties, these Airborne Pilgrims of Pointlessness?)

The lovebugs swarm over Florida every May and September; small, ant-resembling. I first visited Florida in May. Moved here the following September. The lovebugs greeted me both times.

They are my friends, therefore, these black (rather than gray), reviled, unwelcomed members of earth’s lowest class of living thing.

Yes, they welcomed me. I guess I should welcome them. Too bad they aren’t beautiful, which is what you would expect from something called —a lovebug.

Love can be ugly. But I’d expect a bug with peacock majesty. No such luck.

At the restaurant…

I ate an egg cooked medium. Outside, no flowers anywhere. They say it’s a good time to plant petunias.

SO LET ME SUMMARIZE ..AND RHAPSODIZE:

The lovebugs swarm/ the lovebugs smear/ the lovebugs swarm and smear

Which means May’s for car washes.

Rain and thunder come, briefly, at 2 p.m.

Soak the Florida Room carpet.

Briefly interrupt the drought.

So we hope for rain, we hope for flowers.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

Hello, May. Hello, Lovebugs, so many living and soon to die.

(I saw one, all alone, very lost, crawling across the restaurant floor, having flown in through an open door.

Looking for a mate, that bug, no doubt.

A very bad place for that.

I gave that bug very poor odds.

Too many shoes, no mate in sight.

I wished it luck. Speaking of which

Golden Tempo won the Kentucky Derby in May ritual as certain

as lovebugs coming to Florida.

Golden Tempo.

Which reminds me

Of time’s Leaden Tempo

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace…

I think I’ll plant a petunia.

BRIEF APRIL FLIGHT

There is a bird outback, species uncertain, pecking at seeds that have fallen to the ground.

Where will that bird sleep tonight? A nest, of course. Birds make nests, though we rarely see them. I rarely see them, anyway. Will they sleep in the sand? Bob Dylan, you recall, became famous, asking in song, in that high nasal tone of his, How many seas must a white dove sail…

Sail, not fly. Interesting choice of words. It works, actually, being eupamistically better than “fly”.

And Bob goes on to ask where the white dove’s flight will end…

…before she sleeps in the sand?

“She”. Better than “it.” Better, too, than, “he”. Plummage or other characteristics can give away, to the trained eye, the sex of a bird, and this is no less so with a dove, but we don’t know about Dylan’s “white dove” and, I’ll bet, neither does Dylan — but the word “she” has a softening, peaceful touch — that female touch (though, in suggesting thus, I risk being declared “sexist” in the year 2026).

So much about words! But words –on their flight — can land smoothly, or crash.

Sea, sand and time. A dove. An answer “blowing in the wind.”

Beautiful, evocative thoughts, images, words.

But not necessarily, at least where white doves are concerned, ornithologically correct.

But such things don’t matter where song lyrics or poems are concerned. Poems and lyrics have their own flight path. I see what the songwriter is saying. The poet, too, when Wallace Stevens writes of the “gold-feathered bird”.

But it occurs to me to ask:

Do birds ever sleep in the sand? I read that some species do sleep in the sandy shallows — to avoid predators. The white dove (the symbol of peace), apparently must, like all of us, fear her enemies and is probably subject to battles and all-out wars that erupt among avian species. I know that bluejays, lovely as they are with those layers of blue, have been known to raid nests (not, I’ve read, a constant practice; just a survival strategy when food is short. And isn’t that what causes many wars? Shortages?)

How far does a white dove fly – or sail – on any given day?

I’ve read that a carrier pigeons can fly as much as 400 to 600 miles in a day. In 1982, the skeletal remains of a carrier pigeon were found in the chimney of a home in Bletchingly, Surrey, England, believed to have been among the 250,000 carrier pigeons trained by volunteers of the British National Carrier Pigeon Service and provided in World War II to the invading British armies during the 1944 D-Day invasion. Attached to it (we’ll say “her”) leg was a red cannister containing an encripted message believed to have been intended for a Royal Air Force Bomber Command. She likely had flown from the heart of Nazi-controlled Europe on her vital mission carrying her messager when other forms of communication between armies were deemed less reliable.

The message in the cannister was addressed to XO2. Whoever that might be. It was, as noted, encripted and has not, to this day, been de-coded.

(One could only wish it had said….Commander, how about you lay down your arms, and, for God sake, don’t send over any more bombers. These German guys told me they’re damn weary of war. When I left them, they’d flocked — like birds of a feather — into a beer hall./ The last I heard them, they were singing psalms, getting loaded..

Unlikely, of course.

We know no one at that point was weary of fighting. Pace, Bob Dylan, they weren’t about to ban any cannon balls. Who uses cannon balls anymore? Rockets, missilnukes, missiles, drones….those are our modern weapons of choice.

The poor bird never completed its mission. One can, of course, fantasize that during her long flight over the North Sea or maybe over the White Cliffs, her little pigeon’s heart grew dispondent with advancing the purposes of war; that the white dove in her longed to sleep in the sand. No telling why she died, ( broken heart? homesickness? –or why she chose a chimney for her final rest carrying her final message. Perhaps, despite her presumed keen sense of direction, she’d become lost. Lost and despondent.

And somewhere, a bomber commander, code-named XO2, stood waiting at the aerodrome for a message from the front that never arrived. He probably died wondering why he never saw that small gray-feathered spector winging toward him out of the blue.

But, of course, I’ve gone from orthonological reality to bad poetry here. Skylarks, Nightingales, Crows, Flamingoes, Mockingbirds, Wallace Stevens’s “gold-feathered bird” whose “fire-fangled feathers dangle down”. They’ve all had their turn as poetic motifs in the hands of real poets. Why not the lowly carrier-pigeon, service her country? Or even just those wobbly-footed, head-bobbing urban dwellers devour peanuts in every park, now and then summoning enough motivation to take flight and deposit white streaks down office windows, earning them the derogation “flying rats”?

How long does any bird live?

I’ve read three to ten years, depending on all those factors one can imagine — weather, predation, disease, hunters. (I once failed to save the life of a cedar waxwing that, drunk on some purple variety of berry, crashed into a store window, maybe seeing itself, thinking she’d found a companion, or mate, and rushed toward it. End of story.

I could go on about birds. Continue my flight.

But I won’t. And you should be glad.

Except to say — how blessed it would be to be able to fly!

But how blessed to know we are likely to live more than ten years.

Wallace Stevens gets to close us out, for he wrote, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” A)mong twenty snowy mountains, and among many other places. And he gave to the lowly pigeon the honor of concluding his famous poem, “Sunday Morning,” writing how at evening, casual flocks of pigeons make/Ambiguous undulations as they sink,/ Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

ON THE BACK PORCH AND …”IN EDEN GARDEN”AS SPRING ARRIVES ONCE AGAIN AT THE LAST MILE

Spring, or nearly spring. Nearly Easter. Nearly the Holy Season. Once again.

I popped into The Last Mile mainly to say hello to Deano at the bar. It was nearly 5 p.m. today. There was a scattering of people at the tables, oddly no one I knew. But Deano informed me that PipPa Goldflower was having drinks on Knox the artist’s back porch upstairs. You get there through a side door and up a stairway off the side street. Knox’s door was open and I could see through his cramped dining area — full of leaning, half-finshed canvases and other junk — that he was, in deed, out there on his back porch with Pippa. I joined them. They gave me welcoming hellos. Pippa was in a long shift, florid, almost tropical (for spring, I presume). Knox was in jeans and a black shirt open at the neck, having a kind of priestly air — the black highlighting his gray, trimmed beard. They sat in cheap folding chairs I’m sure Knox picked up at Walmart.There was one more leaning against the wall and I took it. Down below were remnants of the winter’s fierce, unending snowfalls. It had been some winter. Of course, this being New England, it isn’t necessariliy over yet. But, spring seemed to be approaching at last… the temperature, the extra daylight, a certain smell of vegitation as it emerged from the ice and snow….

Also down below in the dirt lot that was parking for Knox, Deano and whoever worked at The Mile (everybody else parked on the street). It’s also where Joe Barron, owner of The Last Mile, held an occasional outing. Knox’s old 1994 Volvo was down there pulled up against the lone tree. That car barely hangs together to get him around (for those trips to Walmart, etc.) . It is burgundy red. Out ahead were the trees and the rooftops of the neighborhood and Knox had always hope he could get a peek through those roofs and trees at the blue ocean at Revere Beach. He claims you can do that when things line up (like he’s saying the trees and rooftops move aside for him???Maybe after a couple of Blushing Monks). Dean says in winter, when the trees are bare, you can see the ocean from the roof of the building. I haven’t been up on the roof. Maybe someday. Maybe not. (Maybe someday Joe Barron will stage a party up there. Oh, how dangerous!)

“So, a little change in the weather,” said Pippa. She had turquoise beads and a pendant hanging down over her shift. Her hair is dyed a kind of maize color and was pulled back behind her ears and flowed down her back. She has a wonderful smile that illuiminates a face that has been Botoxed to a vinyl-like smoothness. I could only guess at Pippa’s age — and I won’t. She’s an attractive women, will never age.

I thought these two might make lovers someday — but, no. Just friends. Good friends. Loyal patrons of the world of The Last Mile that Knox had graced with his mural art, making the place — from time to time –attractive to, believe it or not, tourists who happen to consult a guide to local “interesting” joints.

“The snow was eye-high out there,” Knox said. And right now, the air was mild enough for us to be sitting outside without jackets. The occasional breeze reminded us that that could change as the sunlight drifted west. Perhaps that breeze came from the ocean Knox hoped to see — like Balboa when he found the Pacific. Knox would discover the Atlantic.

“The war is driving me nuts,” Pippa said. I didn’t want to bring up the war. Who can do anything about the war who hangs around The Last Mile?

“All this reminds me of favorite poems,” said Knox, shifting quickly away from war.

Of course it did — whatever “all this” was — and something was always reminding Knox of poetry. He named the poems. Things by Keats, Shelley, Byron. Knox is a romantic.

“The world gets renewed by art and poetry,” he said.

“So, renew us,” I said. What he proceeded to give us wasn’t one of the Romantics. Even I, the old English major, knew that. But I thought I recognized it.

In Just-spring when the world is mudlicious, the little lame balloon man whistles far and wee…

That was how the poem went, spilling out in Knox’s deep baratone. He recited the whole thing from memory. It was by e.e. cummings. I did recognize it — Strang little thing, but nice. Yes, I liked it. I know e.e. cummings. He’s fun. He’s good for spring.

“I know the others,” Pippa said. “I know what you’re going to give us. Cummings is your only modern guy. Next you’ll recite some Romantics. Try to impress us with your memory.”

Knox laughed.

“But let me get one in there edgewise, if I may, “Pippa said.

I knew Pippa liked Edna St. Vincent Millay. How did I know that? Well, this sort of thing — these quirky patrons of the Mile sitting around, musing –had happened one day last spring when it was still chilly out and Knox and Pippa and some guy she’d linked up with, an arty type, were sitting around a table and Knox had his Blushing Monk in front of him. (This day, up there on his porch, he and Pippa just had half-drunk cups of coffee.)

“So, what have you got for us, Pip?” I said.

Nothing is so beautiful as spring,” she said. That was the beginning of her poem. It wasn’t her lady Edna S.V.M. It was someone and something else. A strange little poem, which continued…into spring…

When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;         

   Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush         

Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring         

The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;

   The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush         

   The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush         

With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.         

No, she hadn’t memorized that. She was reading off her iPhone. But that was quite some poem.

“Gerard Manley Hopkins,” she said.

“Ah, the old Jesuit,” I said. “Sprung rhythm,” I added, summoning a memory of English class.

“There’s more,” she said.

“Well, by all means, let’s hear it,” said. Knox.

And we did, in Pippa’s velvet voice. (I believe she been on the stage at one time.)

What is all this juice and all this joy?  she said, reading.

Juice. Joy. Yeah, That sounded like Hopkins. Really — evocative, the way he writes. Odd rhythms. Odd diction. (I was really channeling Literature 101 now.)

Pipa went on…        

   A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning

In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy,         

   Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,         

Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,         

   Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.    

Wild, wierd stuff,” said Knox.

“Not unlike your paintings,” said Pippa.

“I liked it,” I said while Knox was still laughing. “I like Hopkins. It’s religious, of course. He was a priest, after all.”

“Religion, poetry–we’ve had it all out here,” Knox said, sipping his cooling coffee –which, I’d wager, had a drop of brandy in it. “I’d call it sufficient. Enough! Enough with words! Words, words, words….

Now,” he said, stood, plainly a little stiff from sitting — and a little “juiced”, though he’d greatly moderated lately. He went to the porch rail which I hoped could take his leaning weight, ” let me see if, just for once, I can see the sea out there.”He stared, in silence — as if “on a peak in Darian.” (I was channeling poetry now, too. Channeling Keats. Phrases popping into mind.

“Yes! I see it,” Knox said exuberently. He meant the ocean.

I’m sure he did. I’m sure at that point, old Knox, flush with springtime and in the presence of Pippa his warmest inspiration, his “juices and joys” flowing — I’ll bet he could see all the way to England.

And if we stayed out there long enough, he’d be seeing all the way to the moon.

Yes, there were more poems.  And some repeats, the world down below us, the mudlicious, the little lame balloon man’s whistles far and wee… (Pippa said she could hear it on some nearby street) … We were with old G.M. Hopkins …In Eden garden.

I stayed with them until the early spring dusk set in.

ST. PATRICK’S DAY WE’LL ONCE AGAIN BE WALKING THE GREEN MILE AT THE LAST MILE LOUNGE

Soon it will be St. Patrick’s Day and there will be the usual little buffet with chafing dishes on card tables at the back of the room at The Last Mile Lounge — and a green laurels over the bar back mirror, carefully put in place by Deano who claims multi-racial lineage. Corned beef and cabbage will be served. There’s usually a turnout of all-season, all feast regulars, and loyal once-a-year regulars. Parades up the TV….a fair amount of song from the first or second generation sons of Erin who inividually pop in for a “pint” now and and then, but, as I say, the regulars and the now-and-thens mingle happily festooned in green. Some will come early, but most will converge, in keeping with tradition, at noon on The Day.

You could expect to see Terry “Tarps” Walsh (an old fellow house painter with Stickey Sammartino who sees to it Columbus Day is a big deal at The Mile –and wouldn’t miss joining his old friend “Tarps” in an Italo-American version of “The Wild Colonial Boy” on St. Patrick’s Day.)

And for all events that afternoon, for all purposes, there will Paulie O’Brien, Paddy Byrne, Jo-Jo Sullivan, “Tiny “Mullen (who tips the scale at about three hundred pounds), Joe “Red O’Hara ( a name that for me evokes the memory of my late brother-in-law of the same name, hair color and complexion), Dennis Patrice (the only Haitian-Irish American I know), Emmanuel “Manny” Fitzgerald, who is African-American but always turns out in homage to that Irishman somewhere in his family tree, be he slave-holder or liberator), Mickey Fahey, “Mutt” Kelly, Jeff Roach, Dave O’Connor, Pete O’Connell, “Sniffles” McHoole, Declan McNamara and each will bring a wife or girlfriend, though there will be some stags.

it should be crowded, given that The Mile consists of very modest floor space.

And the Reverend Gene Rooney will come to provide a blessing and a poem or two — and to remind everyone that the day is a celebration of an Irish saint who, against great odds and amid enormous hardship, converted the craggy, pagan peoples of the Emerald Isle to the faith and that the faith lingers, though severely challenges in that land now, as Fr. Rooney, a native of Limerick, will remind everyone. (He is, otherwise, a parochial vicar at some tony suburban church but grew up , after his childhood emigration with his parents to the hard scrabble neighborhoods of Lynn.

So there will be prayers and songs — and “Tarps” Walsh’s augmented version of the traditonal Irish prayer (i.e., “May the road rise up to meet you, may the rain fall soft upon your fields, etc…), and Paddy Byrne will, as always, predictably declare, “was that what happened to me the other night !?– I thought I fell on my face, but it was the road that rose up to meet me!”

And “Tarp’s prayer (I said it was “augmented” — or, at least, extended, or desccralized from its ancient tradition, as it often is in barroms from South Boston to Block Island:

Tarps will stand in the middle of the room and intone,” for ALL of you sons of Ireland and your guests — my prayer is that your souls be in heaven at least twenty-four hours before the Devil even knows your dead.”

Amen.

CRUMBS

The wall clock gongs inacurately. It might give you two gongs for seven o’clock. It just, at eight o’clock (which it is, or was a second or two, or three ago) gonged out the Westminster chime as a prelude, as it always does, but gave no gongs for eight o’clock.

It can’t be fixed. A clock repair person told me that.

But it’s a nice clock, so it will stay there on the wall, irrespective of innacurate –or no — gongs to count out the hour.

Who needs to be reminded of passing hours, of passing time? This clock doesn’t tick, either, like many old clocks.

Tick, tick, tick, tick….

No. Utterly silent.

But just hearing the Westminster chimes, as if in some beautiful sqaure in sunlight or fog, in London, or New York, or Boston, is enough — imagining time stopped eternally. This side of time is the only time we have to worry about time.

In 2023 I did a post, Last Day of February. I’m always conscious, perhaps too conscious, of passing time, of my failure to advance, to finish projects –conscious of getting older. Last night I was thinking how it was the last day of February again. The last hours. Three years later. Not a lot of progress in my life, as I see it. There is much that has been begun, but not finished.

Now it’s March 1st — again.

In 2023, my Last Day of February post began:

The short month. Two months into the new year. The kitchen butcher block rolling table always seems to have crumbs on it. 

Lost time. Nothing left but crumbs.

Time leaves crumbs — crumbs and memories.

I just checked the butcher block table. Still crumbs on it.

I’ll wipe them away.

I’ll keep the memories.

LIFE’S YELLS (TWISTS) AND SHOUTS

There are all kinds of yells and shouts. Happy and sad ones, useful and necessary ones, warning ones.

It didn’t bother me in any way when I heard the guys out back of me briefly this morning find the need to yell. (In fact, I could barely hear this particular yell, or shout; I was just listening in fascination.) It was just one guy, in the course of his work; he was counting — counting, as in– one, two,three….

I’m surmising that he and his co-workers must have been lifting something, or lowering something. The one guy probably needed to yell so the other guys and he would be doing in concert whatever possibly risky task they were executing.

I had let the dog out and was filing the bird feeders. The men were at work beyond the parallell border of white PVC and chain link fencing and masking profusion of Brazilian pepper bushes.

I’ll bet those are hard working guys over there, though I don’t really know what they do. Move big things around., no doubt, laboring on this Thursday morning in some kind of warehouse whose function I’ve not yet — in six-going-on-seven years living here, bothered to ascertain. They ride around in bleating, rattling fork-lifts. It’s one of a million American workplaces where they perform some obscure but necessary function for the rest of us. God bless them.

Three times I heard yelled, “one….two…three….” Three times, something happened.

At the Space Center, when they work to lift off a rocket, they count in reverse….three, two, one….Lift Off!! Maybe they were lowering a rocket out back. Lift… Down!!

Just kidding.

I interviewed the retired editor of the Boston Globe and he recalled how, way back in the old days, a guy in the mailroom of the old Newspaper Row offices and presses announced the first press run of the morning edition by yelling, THEY’RE UP, THEY’RE UP, THEY’RE UP. (I don’t know if anybody was counting the papers as they rolled off. But everybody knew they were coming.

Jack Driscoll (the retired editor) sat in his wheelchair and repeated that memorable shout in the living room of his seaside New Hampshire home. It was almost as if he could hear the presses rumbling again.

I thought of that moment when I read of his death.

One of my earliest memories is a fleeting recollection of being on the streets of Boston’s North End with my parents and we were about to attend my late brother Bill’s graduation ceremonies from Christopher Columbus High School.

There was an Italian guy standing by a pushcart laden with fruit and vegetables and he was shouting.

I didn’t know what to make of it. Why was he shouting, and to whom? Of course, in time I’d know he was selling his produce, shouting for customers. Fresh tomatoes here!!!

My brother Doug worked after high school for the S.D. Warren Paper Company nestled in the heart of the city, very close to Boston’s primarily (in those days) Italian North End. He would come home and say how, every day, he heard some truck driver in the alley below –hear his echoing shout, Hey Wal-YO!”

I would learn from a history professor years later that this means, Hey, boy in Italian. It is apparently a common shouted Italian street greeting. In this case, it was probably coming from some Italo-American driver who made daily deliveries and needed someone to open a loading dock door –someone who knew their Italian. Just a guess.

Or maybe just one Italian fellow was greeting another as their round of daily work began. Shouting that greeting.

I recall being taken to my first-ever professional baseball game by my father. It was a Boston Braves game and there was a guy selling programs and, being very small and impressionable, still ignorant in the ways of theadult world (I was about six years old), I thought the guy was yelling up to the huge painted image of a feathered Indian brave on the stadium wall behind him — as if he expected the brave to answer him.

On November 9, 1957, I was barely eleven and was brought back to the same stadium, which, after the departure of the Braves for, first, Milwaukee, then Atlanta) became Boston University’s football home field . Today it is called Nickerson Field and retains some vestages of the old National League baseball venue, including the right field bleechers.

Of course, the image of the brave is long gone. But it was still on the stadium wall that November day in 1957, greatly faded. He had, in this frozen image, a feather still dangling from his hair and his mouth cupped with his hand — because he is supposed to be shouting, presumably an Indian war chant — just as he had been those four or five years before. Small wonder, in my six-year-old small and wondering mind, the program vendor and the massive Indian brave above and behind him appeared to be shouting to one another. (What could they possibly be saying to one another?)

I recall a letter written by an American soldier from Vietnam, provided me for a story I was preparinig about the soldier and his wartime experiences. He wrote of being wakened from sleep in his tented, temporary billet by someone urgently yelling, MORTAR! MARTAR! and told his father — the recipient of the letter — how he clambored into a fox hole in his underwear, undoubtedly with other soliders, and had to be pulled from the depths of the probably muddy hole when the attack was over. It was not, alas, the final attack he would witness or, ultimately, survive.

I musn’t end that way — in war, in sorrow. I must believe that somewhere now on the planet — probably in many places — someone is shouting for joy.

Beginning in 1961, The Top Notes, the The Isley Brothers, then The Beatles exhorted us, happily, to twist and shout.

And in this primordially, perpetually twisted universe in which we are afflicted by Adam’s fall, we, in great hope — in Matthew 10:27 –are urged to shout from the rooftops the Good News.

So I guess there is good news. I’ll need a ladder to get to the rooftop.

And I hear those fellows over the fence, in shadow and sunlight. They — and I — are counting on it. The Good News, that is.

Maybe they’ve got a ladder I can borrow.

A NORWEGIAN VISITOR TO ‘THE LAST MILE’ RECOUNTS CHILDHOOD MEMORIES OF RUSSIAN DARKNESS

She entered quietly on the arm of a periodic visitor to The Mile who lives a block away and occasionally comes in for a hot dog at lunch tme. The neighor’s name is Ingrid and we knew her to be Norwegian-born. The woman, a striking-looking figure with gray hair and sharp, clear features, was named Sigrid. I’d come to find out that she spoke clear, faintly accented English. I knew the neighbor well enough to be greeted by her as they entered and she saw me chatting with Deano at the bar. “Come meet my aunt,” she said.

I sat with them for a full hour, ordered a hamburger at the bar (no table service in The Mile) , and was so glad I’d stopped in and so glad I spent the time — for Sigrid, it turned out, is a very stalwart and healthy and beautiful 90-years-old and, as a small girl, visited all over Europe and Scandanavia and was speaking of her Russian sojourn — of having seen crowds at Lenin’s Tomb. She spoke perfect English though she’s live in Oslo most of the year. She visits her neice, I learned, at least once a year and loves Boston.

“I did not see Lenin’s mummy,” she said of her long-ago Russian journey. “But I saw the queque which stood for hours and waited to get into the mausoleum. And I have seen the Red Square lie as barren as the steppes of Asia when the mausoleum was closed -but along the outskirts of the square the river of people would stream. The side streets poured their tributaries into it, and people walked, walked, walked. I have never been down in the Moscow subway, but a time or two I tried to board with my mother the packed street-cars with people hanging in clusters inside and outside. It would be a hard ride, for at that time, the streets everywhare in Moscow were full of holes and humps, probably heaped and broken by the cold weather such as you here in the United States are having now, and by war.”

“What were you doing in Moscow?” I asked. “The Soviet Union at the time, of course. It could not have been easy to get in and there might have been a fear of getting out.”

“I believe my mother — Ingrid’s grandmother –was on some kind of a misison of charity for her church. She never spoke of the reason for her travel to me, a child, and I, sadly, lacked the curiosity to ask.”

“Was it a secret, why she was there?”

“I don’t believe so,” said Sigred, “but there were a great many secrets in those days in eastern Europe. And I believe the devil had come to visit that region and has never left. And my mother might have feared speaking of it so long as there might be agents, even in Norway. Communist agents, that is.”

A somber remark, to be certain. She went on.

“For a child, there was something hypnotic to finding myself, a child, walking among streams of total strangers in the cold, for it was winter. I have not been a stranger to cold or to winter in my native Norway. But, beyond the weather, there was something cold about the people I saw. My mother spoke to no one, and the faces I saw when I looked up were empty. I was perhaps nine-year-old. I did not see one Russian who smiled, except the attendants on the Trans-Siberian Railroad.

“The English word ‘stolid’ might best describe the expressions on the faces of the Russians I encountered. Not ‘solid’ –though they were solid in a way, but ‘stolid.’ And there seemed to be no individual differences in the faces and demeanor. In an American or a Eurpean crowd, one encounters all manner of persons. This has been my experience during a long life. But my childhood impression of the Russians I saw was very bleak–and this was immediately after the end of hostilities in the World War when much of Russia had been ravaged by the German Armies whom Russia and the Allies ultimately defeated and drove off. There was rubble everywhere. But the weight of the dictator and the shadow of Lenin fell once again over the vast Russian territories. For Norway, under the heal of collaborators and for America and the West, victory meant freedom. Not so for the Russians. My mother later told me how she had been told stories of both glory and of wretchedness. But if you wish to know, I believe what my mother ultimately believed was that we were walking in a universe of miserable lies.”

I reminded myself of the definition of “stolid”: unemotional, expressing little or no sensibility.

And then, darkening my mood at this narrative, Sigrid began to speak of what had perhaps most impressed her about the heart of the Soviet Union she experienced with her young senses: it was the unaccountable stench– that made her welcome, on the day she and her mother departed Moscow, the distant rumble of thunder somewhere distant from their hotel room, and the sight and sound of warm summer rain falling on the city of millions and hoping it was washing it clean.

And, as I sat there with aunt and daughter, I thought of the stinking darkness that closed over the vast Russian heartland after 1945 and that has yet to depart entirely, though I have not been there and dare not judge too harshly the Russian soul when we all know there have to be good, brave, noble, pure souls in that nation always longing to be free either to defeat their overlords or to escape, as we may need someday to escaape — if we’re not careful –from our own country. I know how so many feel about the current government. But what of the alternatives to which an alarming number seem drawn.? I can see New Yorkers one day, even in this present day, choosing to flee that grand city by degrees — escaping the slow imposition of a kind of rancid socialist dream that, again, by degrees, might be realized by its handsome, smiling elected acolyte. New Yorkers and, potentially, all of us might come to know what the late Arthur Koestler wrote of in Darkness at Noon.

Far-fetched? Maybe. Maybe not. I leave the likes of Solzhenitsyn and Doestoyevsky and Tolstoy to go on post humously warning us of the horror that crept over their homeland and was hatched out of a Faberge’ egg that was Tzarist Russia, and that finally spilled its yoke out onto the streets in 1917 and that keeps spilling onto all manner of places around the globe, doing horrible things — Vietnam and Cambodia come to mind — and that is constantly seeping into new places, far and near.

Dumb metaphor, I know. But you get the point, I hope.

I thanked Sigrid and Ingrid for that bracing hour of conversation in the cold monthy of February at a little table in the little place called The Last Mile.