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 name the guys now — it’s a guy’s group, ladies invited. And its held in a guy named Ronnie Belecavitch’s apartment. It’s the apartment where his Lithuanian parents lived until the day they died. Theyh 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 remember 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 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, “Yeah, this guy Balin comes in one night with a bunch of guys. Haven’t figured out where they come from — didn’t feel like asking them. It was nice seeing fresh blood out at those tables. I didn’t want to scare them off. They all order some serious drinks and tonight, they’re have a ‘first line’ contest. This much I know because I ask. I don’t know first lines or last lines or the first thing about poetry except maybe, “roses are red, violets are blue…”
“‘There’s a first line. 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.”
First Line Contest’,” I said. Interesting. You gotta know your poetry to know random first lines.”
“They drink and remember first lines of poems,” Dean said, ” and see who could identify the poem. The winner takes a drink. They get good and warm.”
He swabbed the bar. There were a few guys watching the Red Sox game up on the Sanyo flat screen over the bar. They were more toward the front window by the red glow of the Rolling Rock neon sign and the front door. They sat where the polished oak bar curves, a world away from poetry.
The the poetry guys were along the back wall betwen the juke box and up against Knox’s Last Mile mural.
I heard the knit-cap guy blurt out the first first line. He was a guy with a gray bear and a knit hat crunched down on his head. He appeared to be the ring master (I’m thinking 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.
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