People Poems
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Prologue
There were 7, 655,957,369 people populating the world as of November 2020, according to the response from a voice activated query on a smart phone. An ever-vigilant Siri responded to the query before I could snap a finger. Therefore, one can speculate the minimum number of stories to be told, assuming there is at least one story per person worth telling, would be that number. For this collection of poetry, the objective is to tell a few of those stories and let other poets be concerned about the other seven billion or so stories to be told. Some of these poems are about real people, and sometimes it is obvious, and other times not. There are an infinite number of ways to categorize or classify or approach people, such as the crafts that they do, or a chance encounter, or a relationship, and that in turn provides an infinite number of possibilities.
Charlie Rose, a very gifted journalist and interviewer, appears endlessly curious when interviewing a variety of people of great accomplishments, about how they approach their craft and profession. He is journalistically ambitious in pursuing how the process starts and myriad versions of that line of query. Someone more gifted or with more time available would do well do write a book of poetry focused on the endless variety of crafts and “things” people are able to do. Every craft and every profession and all that we do, has its special fascination and interest and contribution to our humanity.
The Last Dream
She lives in the vessel of a wasted body
On the fringes of her ninetieth winter
Surveying the threshold of death
Spoon-fed and bathed in bed
As she was on the other side of her life
She accepts the small doses of life
Being pumped into her
And denying her the peace
That is a heartbeat away
From engaging her with her mortality.
As she stares face to face
Into the eye of whatever God
She has accepted or found or invented
She peers over the shoulder of her life
Succoring the memory of a love she once lost
For lack of courage or lack of a dream.
She holds a wrinkled tear-stained picture
Of her ageless lover to her breast-less chest
Living her last dream
And confronting her eternity
Dreaming and searching for her ageless lost love.
He Lives Forever
He died before he lived
A full measure of his life
More years ago than is pleasant to recall
And now he is ageless in my mind’s eye
There is a woman he would have loved
Not knowing her eternal loss
There is a place he would have lived
Never knowing the echo of his laughter.
There is a dream he would have sought
That lies silent in his endless night.
He was just a boy
Just a boy with unknown expectations
Taking his first full breath of manhood
And the black water swallowed him
There was no one to hear
His last breath crash through his lungs
No one to remember
Sometimes in my mind and faded memories
There is a glimpse of him
And he lives forever.
Picking Cherries
(Remembrance of Uncle Morris Fusco)
He lay in the hospital room bed
Somewhere in the midst of his ninth decade
His glasses straddling
The bridge of his emaciated nose
He smiles broadly as I entered the room
All his visitors are part of the unspoken final vigil
Of clichéd discussions
About how well he looks
And how soon he will be home.
At his venue in the hospital he greets those
Who are part of the equation of his life
This dark-haired chiseled nose man
With skin the texture of suede
And the color of fine olive oil
As he gently tips toes on the cusp of eternity.
He spoke of cherry trees
In the Italian hills
In the land of the mezzo giorno
In the latter part of the 19th century
And reminisced of his joy of picking cherries
With his friends a lifetime ago.
He recalls that spring had generously dressed
Cherry trees generously in silky white blooms
In the summer abundance the cherries thrived
Poke-a-dotting the trees limbs
Enticing anticipating children
And he among them
To assault and plunder the summer fruit.
He explained that the cherries were tempting
And the thievery of the bronze skinned boys
Caused them to flirt
With heaven and hell
Tottering on the cusp of a venial or mortal sin
Answerable to the village priest
Who was both feared and loved.
As he traveled through his distant recollections
The laughter exploded from his eyes
He escaped the reality of death
With ancient reminiscing.
“Oh, those cherries were good”
And he repeated it again and then again
And with his outstretched arms
Imagined picking the cherries
With his now thin deeply veined hands.
He spoke of the local priest
Admonishing him of his venial sin
That could require multiple Hail Mary’s
As he kneeled on skinned knees
In a centuries old chapel
Where he was baptized.
He said he knew my name when I entered
But now he queried who I was
I wish I had stayed longer or returned
To share his story of the cherry trees
I wonder if the trees yet peer from
The hills of his small village in Italy
Escaping the progress of the bulldozer
And the surveyor’s certain eye
Possibly still generously providing cherries
And tempting a new generation of boys
With new dreams as they maneuver its branches
Peccato! What a pity!
If those cherry trees are no longer there.
In that now slender cylinder of time
Lived a memory of a sublime moment of joy
“Oh, those cherries were good”
Recalling that poignant moment of adventure
Sublime and prominent in his faded memory
The corners of his mouth
Defined a soft gentle smile
As he faced eternity
With such a joyful memory and with God’s blessing.
Red Maple
The thud of compressed air
Pushed the pellet through the cold winter day
It rode the boy’s eye
Until hitting the red maple
Midway between its first branch
And the snow blanketing the ground and
Now knee deep to the first branch.
A bead of sap trickled from the wound
Staining the bark
Until coagulated by the cold
The boy aimed his eye again
And with singular intent and purposefully
Shot the pellet wide
And felt brother to the wounded red maple.
Jesus
In his letter
He said he loved Jesus
And Jesus loved him
He traveled three thousand miles
To find Jesus
Not knowing that Jesus
Waited at his departure
Met him at his destination,
And made the journey with him.
He was pushed through the sacraments
Painfully and blindly memorizing
The image of a white piercing eyed
Tall and middle parted longhaired
White gowned Jesus.
He traveled three thousand miles
And God’s infinite light year
To find Jesus was
1/infinity of an inch away
In his heart.
Boyhood
A boy never gets over his boyhood
Every man must cry in the night
At least once during life’s long journey
For the memory of the boyhood eyes
That saw the moon through the astronomer’s clear sky.
Boyhood is a time of firsts
In preparation for the more final decisions of life
First love
First love lost
First second love
First love lost to be regained again
And so on with the endless algorithms of love.
A boy has time to collect the day’s up
And fill his pockets
With coins to jingle
With marbles and strings
And dreams
Not limited by what is practical or possible
Nor restrained by what can be imagined
Untethered to protocols and formalities
And demands of life.
Boyhood is a time
For a curious boy to do things
He does not like doing
So he can spend the rest of his life
Recalling the joy of doing them.
Boyhood is a perfect time to be a boy.
Let’s Go Watch People Think
Let’s go watch people think
Feel their ideas oozing from their being
Let’s smell the passion of a vibrant thought
Let’s feel the texture of a wistful wishful dream
Nestled deep and warm in the cache of memory.
Let’s touch the tuning fork
Of an expectation coming to fruition
And bubbling at the tip of the tongue
Surging at the apex of the eye
Let’s feel the pulse of embryonic thoughts
Feel the nerve endings of dreams
Riding the conduit of emotion.
Let’s go watch people think.
The Prayer
Alone in a church shattered with silence
He kneels in the soft shadowed darkness
That a church seems to collect
His face shows the agony
Of some penance or remorse
That he is struggling to live with
Or die with
His clenched hands
Are a single fist
In desperate prayer.
His head is bowed
With the weight of some sin
Invented by man
Or by his God
Or the inclinations of his soul.
He comes screaming from the streets
With his life caught up in his throat
Talking to a God he does not know
But fears
And wondering if the God
That lives in steepled houses
Of crafted stone and worn pews
And endless incantations
Will end the pain
That lives inside his soul.
Brothers
They are brothers in body and mind.
They go their separate ways
But travel together in spirit
In search of separate dreams.
One with a different mission
Will search Provincetown for summer dreams
He will fly over safe waters
Burn his skin brown
Drink too much
Eat too little
Drinking his summer wine
He will sit in bars sneering at tourists
Become philosopher and poet
Expert on young flesh
He will burn his throat
With too many cigarettes
And exchange harmless lies
With his young brethren
As they share dreams real and imagined.
The other brother will search Europe
With his quiet excitement
Painting images of reality in his mind
Of cities that were once abstract spots on a map
He will explore the art and cities
Of El Greco, Matisse, Rembrandt, Michelangelo
And fantasize walking in their footsteps and time
He will know well the indefinable
Spartan loneliness of traveling alone.
They shall both returns changed and changing
Old dreams accomplished or lost or forgotten
And new dreams
Too private or unknown to share
Etched in their hearts
For the many summers of their lives.
The Tramp
He is a tramp
A piece of humanity unattached to the world
He walks along the road pushing an A & P cart
With dirty rags and paper bags
A bottle of wine and newspapers
And bagged deposit bottles and cans
Always on schedule
Always on time
Always in exactly the right place
Going from nowhere to nowhere.
He wears all of the badges of the tramp
Muscatel breath and dead eyes
A face browned by sun and dirt
Covered with layers of ill-fitting clothes
He will eat with his hat on
Sleep with his clothes on
Piss in alleys
Eat what others throw away
Live in the special silence
Of being alone in body and soul
Impatient for the next bottle of wine
And the next chance to live or die without pain.
Does he dream of the last time
He laid his head on a women’s breast
Or an endearing smile reaching out to him
Or the smallest kindness offered without appeal and obligation
Or old and ancient childhood memories
Of the smell of his mother baking bread?
A Love Story
They were bonded
By something less sturdy than super glue
Or the tongue and groove fashioned by a master woodworker
Never having exchanged a spoken: I love you.
Unforeseen circumstances required he would be gone
Not for days or weeks
But for many months
She advocated they write letters frequently
Not manufactured emails
Which she deemed too impetuous and uncommitted
And uncaringly and haphazardly ubiquitous
She insisted handwritten letters on parchment
She always used a hushed pale purple paper
He responded in conventional white paper.
They cycle of uninterrupted letters and responses
Created great mutual expectation and joy
Of both sender and receiver
Cherished letters received
Sometimes anxiously left unopened
Until the latter part of the day
For quiet and reflective consideration
And always read multiple times.
One day he received a letter that ended: I love you
And after her name: Always
A torrent of emotions flowed both ways
And the dialogue thundered across the mails
Those powerful confirmations: I love you
Were exchanged with unfettered freedom
The frequency of the letters accelerated
And each was branded with the omnipresent: I love you.
On her pale purple paper
And on his white paper.
He felt boundless emotion and was exhilarated
Writing: I love you
On his pale white paper
With sheer joy and excitement
It empowered him
Filled his heart.
Time passed and he returned from his journey
Their returning kiss and embrace
Was total confirmation
And she explained that writing: I Love You
On the pale purple paper
Was a breathless moment of intense passion
The pen flowing through the paper
With embellished scripted letters
The trip to the mailbox and the anticipated response
The expectation of ending their separation
She loved the sheer passion of writing the three words.
Time past and not too long a time
A torrential change occurred
She now rationalized
That she felt an emotionless void
Between their letters and the reality
Of their being together
She said: she did not love him.
He responded:
That he meant every: I love you
They were not words on paper
But deep-felt emotions
And he did not understand or fathom her explanation
That appeared so casually and heedlessly confessed.
Her feelings and decision were irrevocable
They parted
Never meeting again
Or speaking again
The faded letters
With the now disregarded: I love you
On white paper
And on pale purple paper
Lay in secreted and now forgotten sanctuaries
Both writers avoiding the sacrilege of their destruction
And the written words: I love you
Were immortalized and faded
On purple and white paper
And never consummated.
Greens and Decisions
Should the house be painted green
Considering the commitment of work
And the endless gallons of paint
Demanded something more than a hasty
Or casual decision.
Green was favored
And the precise shade was under consideration.
At work a decision long since made
Becomes undone by reckless incompetence
And now requires
An unpleasant new reconciliation
And a new direction.
Greens and decisions filled my head
As a grim face colleague appeared and simply said:
The son of a common friend
Was killed in the cold night
Mangled in twisted and broken steel and glass
It was head on
And the pervasive cliché was offered
He probably died instantly
Blessed with no pain
As he joined hands with eternity.
Seventeen
Only seventeen
Denied life and this new arriving spring
Blossoming with winter waters
I censured myself for greens and decisions
Driving a little slower
And with some caution for several weeks
The appropriate green was selected
The business decision was re-engineered successfully
And nobody really gave a damn.
A Four-Year-Old
We sat upon an unpainted wooden fence
The rails wrinkled and peeled by uncounted seasons
His slender soiled hand in mine
He said his eyes were blue like the skies
He said his shirt was white like clouds
He spoke of goldenrods
Whose heads bounced in the wind.
His outstretched arms
Measured the breadth of a tree
A mountain top was as high
As his hands could reach
A fallen tree across a brook
Was a mighty suspension bridge
Across a fierce and bottomless chasm
A patch of grass
The long-sought oasis
Crumbled cookies
The weary travelers feast.
A morning’s walk
A Marco Polian journey
Oh My God
So much to learn from a four-year-old.
The Priest
You are a priest
Father to the young and old
Walking the tightrope between God and man
The faithful follow in your footsteps
As you walk with one foot on earth
And one foot in man’s invented heaven
Many join you and others ignore you
In a journey to eternity
With two feet on earth
Or two in heaven or two in hell.
You are brother to the medicine man
To the witch doctor
To the Aztec priest
And the rabbi
All those who search the earth
For God’s footprint
Seeking indulgences and remedies for the soul
And pursuing prospects for a share of eternity.
You are the eyes and the voice of God
Brother of Christ
Agent of the Pope
Servant of the people
Confessor for the world
Keeper of the sacraments.
Are you sometimes crushed
By the weight of your charter?
Do you who know God so well
Still curse the mystery of his silence?
Do you ever have your doubts?
Do you silently cry in the black night?
Do you ever in some mortal agony scream at God?
In your black skinned vestments
You mourn your Christ
And walk in the shadow
Of His words and deeds
And a just God will love you well.
Your Song at Five
You were on the cusp of becoming five
Your perpetual half smile and engaging eyes
Required hardly a millisecond to radiate into a full smile
You wore a gray jacket
Properly buttoned to the top
With a matching cap
Sitting in the back seat of a 1960 Chevrolet
You were joyful
As you sang your improvised song a cappella.
Your singing was exuberant and spontaneous
You rocked your head rhythmically
To the beat of your improvised melody
Your brother slightly protested
At the endless repetition of your engaging song
And then he became engaged and joined the listening.
All these decades later
With the kaleidoscope of memories of your life
That moment is remembered with joy
One can only wonder if in your too brief lifetime
You were ever more joyful and creative and spontaneous
Then the day you sang your song
A cappella and with a pleasant gusto
So many many years ago
In the back seat of the car.
There You Are at Eleven
There you are at eleven
I wonder who you shall be
As I explore and wonder who you are now
At the blush of becoming a teenager
You are a complex evolving disruptive new invention
And one of a kind.
One wonders of the travels to new lands and venues
That will engage your views of the world
And what books you shall read
That will put your mind to flight
To explore great thoughts and insightful ideas.
You are the benefactor and recipient of all the books
And all the thinking
And all the arts and crafts of civilizations
One can wonder how a walk on the beach
Or a poem read by some unforeseen circumstance
Or a book casually recommended
Will shape your mind and put you on a voyage
Where you shall disembark both changed and changing.
Many of us have been where you are
On the grid of our lives at your age
On that unknown and unfamiliar journey
But the experience fails to empower or inform us
To show you the way or advise you
Or profess some profound knowledge
That will direct your compass
And engage your GPS system to effortlessly find the way
Through life with the minimum collateral detours.
For all who make this journey
It is an unfamiliar expedition
But you must have faith
You shall not travel alone.
The Skiers
The frosted breath
Hangs on our mouths like the balloons
That cartoon characters talk into
We shuffle through the tedious lift line
Like the cadence of chained prisoners
Waiting too long provides too much time to be mindful of the cold
And becoming impatient for the mountain that seduces us.
The chairs arrive punctually by two’s
Swallowing the queue of skiers
To fly above maple and pine and birch
Looking over our left shoulder
Are the purple Berkshires
Standing hill to hill
And shoulder to shoulder
Flowing to the lip of the horizon
And exposing the winter sky.
Over our right shoulder
Is less mountain and more fields and pastures
Odd shaped rectangular patches
Of checkered farm land stitched like pieces of lace
Making a seamless garment of the valley.
As we reach the peak
The wind batters us like an angry ocean
Making eyes tear and noses burn
We dive deeper into mufflers and collars
Disembarking on the ocean of snow
And moving from the lift we can hear the silence
And the slight whisper of wind
Thrashing and whooshing through tall pines
Standing shoulder to shoulder on the crest of the mountain.
We stare down the mouth of the mountain
And invite gravity to make us airborne
Exploring undulations in the ripples of the hillside
We shall do one more run
And possibly one more run
But never the last run.
The Baker
The baker walks into the night
While the world sleeps
He never gets used to the rhythm
Of nights being days and days being nights
He must fire his ovens
And knead the dough
Delighting in the texture and pungent odor
Leaving his fingertips
To identify the authorship
As the silent bellies of the world sleep.
The baker is brother
To every ancient man who found sun and rain
Living in the vessel of the kernel of grain
Affording a predictable day of bread
Providing the time and solitude
To paint pictures on walls and stones
Play with his children
Occasionally sleep in the afternoon sun
And search for God in the sky
And in all living things and in his heart.
In the morning
When the world yawns itself awake
The loaves shall lay side by side
Not one of them the same
And the bread shall be buttered
Jammed
And dunked
And dipped and sandwiched
And tasted
With laughter and tears and silence and talk
Unknown to the baker
Who now rests his soul and body
So he shall be the instrument of birth
To conceive tomorrow’s bread.
Anniversary Reflections
We lost him in 1992
In April when a warm spring inundated San Francisco
He was born in 1957
He was predictable in his failure to complain
He never spoke of the finality of his illness.
There are decade anniversaries of 1992 and 1957
We can imagine where he would be
Or what he would be doing on those anniversaries
Of his birth and when we lost him
He is perpetually and agelessly thirty-four years old or young.
There are many memories both faded and enhanced by time
One memory is his being three years old in 1960
He wore a grey cap and matching jacket
In the days when children were dressed up to go to church
Or dressed up to take the train to New York on holiday weekends
To see the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree or the Rockettes.
He sat in the backseat of the 1960 Impala Chevy
It was a time when seatbelts were not considered or embraced
He sang an improvised song of both words and music
Over and over
Delighted to be singing
Absolutely delighted to be heard
His parents and brothers were a captive audience
One of the joys of observing his performance
Was his visceral joy in singing
The perpetual smile on his face
As he both entertained himself and entertained us
It was Mozartian creativity
He was joyful and be was a joy
He was three years old.
Every day is the daily anniversary of his life.
The Photograph
There he stands in the black and white photograph
With a brother and sister standing to the side
Mother and father sitting and unsmiling
Innocent of the journey he would take several years later
The family photograph is faded
With stern and not smiling faces
He is slim and his glance slightly avoids the camera
Seeming to stare into the distance
Avoiding the camera’s searching eye
Possibly he is reflecting or searching for a new dream
Or remorseful about an old dream lost
Or a new dream not properly conceived
He seems comfortable in his double-breasted suit
Round collar and thin tie
He was hardly nineteen
As the world completed the second decade of the twentieth century.
Standing: left Siblings Canio, Rosa, Leonardo Nannariello
Sitting: Father and Mother Luigi and Francesca Nannariello
Circa 1919 in Calitri Italy
He left the Italian hills of Campania a year or so later
Walking down the steep dusty dirt road of Calitri
The town sitting on the mountain top
Entwined by a twisting road
And foot paths traveled for centuries
By sheep and herders and donkeys
With alacrity and toughened legs
How certain were his steps traveling alone
To the railway station hugging the lower hill
He would never stride up that mountain again
Or feel the warm embrace of his mother and father.
He was a cobbler
A calzalaio
The maker and fixer of shoes
Shoes lathered by the dust and fields of Calitri
And worn by the sometimes erratic village cobblestoned streets
Compromised by the smell and stain of sheep droppings
He descended that mountain for the last time
At the beginning of the third decade of the twentieth century
The train traveling through Benevento and Avellino to Napoli
The home of kings and pizza and opera.
In Napoli ships gathered desperate and hopeful men and women
And unknowing children
Searching for dreams not completely formulated
Their pockets lined with more hope than money
Often following and trudging the paths laid by relatives
Who sent encouraging letters from across the ocean
Professing various versions of the roads and dreams paved in gold
For those hungering for useful work and higher expectations
They would sit silent deep in the bowels
Of nameless ships crossing the black waters
No one at the Naples dock to acknowledge or anoint their pilgrimage
Or bless their journey.
During his sweaty and fitful dreams
Did he regret leaving his mountain retreat?
Did he taste fear on his tongue and in his heart?
Did the arms of a brother or sister
Who traveled before him reassure him at the disembarkation?
Did the new language unknown and not understood
Isolate him from expressing any anxiety or failed hopes?
Many thousands made the journey and few returned.
Living in a boarding house
That ignored privacy or cleanliness
He traveled so far and only to live so harshly
He worked slavishly every day
For endless weeks with no definition
And no weekends
Mastering and learning this new language
Without the soft consistent vowel pronunciations of Italian
His words came from his lips for a lifetime
Guttural and deeply accented.
Like so many before him and after him
He came and he saw
And did not conquer but he survived
In his photograph he is forever young
Always ageless
In the hearts and memories of his Mother and Father
The hopes of his unknown journey still lingering
In his distant stare
He embraced a new country and a new life
Never to see the hills of Calitri again
But indelibly marked in his heart and soul
He is Calitrano.
van Gogh Self Portrait
Van Gogh sits in quiet repose
Investigating his mirrored face
Searching the palette for the precise blueness of his eyes
And knowing he must seal the lips in a tight crease
Not to reveal his toothless smile
He considers the inscrutability of his demeanor
Revealing the deep poignant lines
Mapping a face and a life sometimes ferociously lived.
He searches his reflection
Exploring the source of his purple loneliness
His often misdirected red passions and moods
His too frequent uncoupling from the world’s realities
He will explore the anger thrashing within his being
Imprinted in this unknowable face
Putting him in desperate conflict with the world
From which he confronts and defines
His invented or imagined heavens and hells
He is unsettled by his reflected facade
And demons within are awakened
Of his father and his unreconciled God
And women he passionately loved
But not reciprocating the love
And being impervious
To his needs and his demands for survival.
A palette contrived from an old board
Found in a farm yard
A canvas bartered for a small sketch
And acquired by rejecting the alternative
Of a bottle of summer red wine
With paints he once ingested for malicious reasons
He invades and attacks the palette
To avoid the invading darkness chasing a fading sun
His charcoaled fingers have completed the sketch
Unraveling and etching
The topography of his inscrutable face
And searching the tectonics of his soul
Through the portals of his eyes
And breathing life into the canvas.
He deliberates and closes his eyes
Considers either rejecting this rendering
And starting anew by scraping the palette
Or commencing with dabs of paint over paint
To be choreographed on the universe of the canvass
He must consider what is to be revealed or hidden in this portrait
His ancient feelings of empathy for the world
That has suffered far beyond his worst of times.
His silences are as still as winter woods
His impetuous rages and angst
As wild as springtime white water
He realizes the gap between the tip of his tongue
And the tip of his mind is too short
And those he has loved most
Have the marks of his bloodstained words.
He explores the mirror and the palette
Searching for the truth
But his view of truth
Is as tenaciously sought as a mating tarantula
Then in an instant of final retrospection
The commitment is consummated
He will leave the eyes for last
The charcoal etchings will disappear
Beneath the paint
As he plays hide and seek with his soul
Possibly discovering passions unknown to him
He wonders aloud: Who is this person
This stranger living on the canvas.
He wonders
He ponders
And he paints
And imagines
And the world awaits to genuflect to his genius.
Vincent: A Life
Vincent painted dark and brooding paintings
Potato eaters with faces made harsh and stark
By the burden of desperate living
And limited expectations
And death peeking over their shoulders
He painted their somber reality in dark tones.
For the desperate souls in Borinage
He deprecated and degraded himself
Preaching sin and redemption
Ignoring flesh and fashion and social context
He embraced the call of Jesus
With misdirected passion.
He offered women his desperate love
And they neither bartered nor offered love in return
Each rejection was always maliciously disparaging
And his departures always were in pain
He deprived himself of love and bread and wine
For paints and palettes
Walking long avenues and roads to distant fields
Holding back the twilight sun
With the brunt of his mind
Striking desperate and bold strokes
To stretch the day and fill his canvas.
In Paris cafes
He and Lautrec exchanged not inconsiderable lies
Invented a world of art to fit their definition of reality
Under a tidal wave of late-night dialogs
Suckling inordinate amounts of absinthe
They walked the streets together
Hand in hand and heart to heart
Seeking the obligatory comfort of a prostitute
In preparation for another day of paints and canvas
To explore new realities that stirred their imaginations.
Vincent loved and needed Theo desperately
Abusing the needs with unreasonable demands and complaints
And his brotherly passion caused Theo unbounded desperation
They often traveled separate roads
But inextricably bounded and bonded by letters
Mixed with full measures of both joy and desperation
He painted flowers competing with God’s universal hand
He painted faces made more durable than their reality
He painted fields embroidered with sunshine
He painted daisies that dance on the canvas.
Vincent took one last walk in the sunshine
And returned with a canvas in hand
And the setting sun tattooed on his back
With self-inflicted bloodletting
He lay quiet and still in his bed
Awaiting Theo
And as Theo kissed his still and silent lips
Vincent stepped into the canvas of eternity.
Such Perfection
His buttoned shirt is not aligned
His collar is askew
He tucks his shirt
Only within his immediate reach
And shirttails hang out haphazardly
His hair is parted
With three unrelated chaotic parts
And a soft crescent of hair
Lays uneven on the apron of his brow.
A fragment of jelly
Possibly strawberry or grape
Is attached to his cheek
Sandals worn backwards with tie backs astray
His knees are tanned and bruised
With arms akimbo and searching for bugs
Rummaging beneath uncharted and unturned stones
With the certain eye and diligence of a hawk.
His intelligent and curious hands
Search play dough of various colors
Shaping a fistful and multi colored piece
Into to his version of real and imagined animals and devices
His chameleon eyes change from laughter
To various shades of disappointment
And wonderment and amazement
Occasionally he is pleasantly befuddled
As he searches for instant gratification.
From all the offerings of the world around him.
Here he is on the southern cusp of his life
An approximation of one fourteenth my age
One wonders of the uncharted roads he will travel
Of the moments of courage
And calls for rigorous decisiveness
That will trouble and test him
The angels who will collaborate on his journey
With unacknowledged and unsung heroics
Must keep a keen eye and hand on his efforts
To navigate through the demons and pitfalls he must avoid.
Michelangelo sculpted such perfection
From that imperfect marble that produced David
And some version of that perfection will be found
In this malleable and joyous child
And God love him always.
Better Angels
We have the opportunity and the challenge
Each day in so many ways
To be better Angels
If the goal is to be an Angel
Why be angry when better is an option
There can be a desire to live life
As if it were a solo performance
But we must accept the fact
We are just part of the cast.
We rediscover the ancient wisdom
That never and forever
Are imperfect words
In all languages
We delve into the difficulty
Of accepting each day as a preamble
To the new book of life unwritten
And yet written anew every day.
We must sculpt ourselves
From the old block of our lives
Chipping away all that is no longer us
To find out what is us
Much as the sculptor chips away from the block of marble
All that is not an angel
To find the angel hidden inside.
There are no corners in life to hide
And no shadows to elude reality
And the bright promise of hopeful tomorrows
We must kiss the lip of tomorrow’s expectations
And step into the horizon
For the rest of our lives.
There will come a time for us
When we will architect a palette of colors
Into a seamless tapestry
Transforming a house into a home
An acquaintance into someone loved
A dream into a reality
Joining unconnected events
Into the fabric of a new life
There are times we will be imperfect Angels
But always striving.
Motivated and determined to be better Angels
Through a dialogue with God
Or a monologue with ourselves
We must be patient with our God and ourselves
We must strive to be better Angels
And God shall love us well for our endeavors.
The Wood Carver
With knife in hand
He carves with a careful rhythm
Searching with his patient eye
For the width and breadth
Of the face hidden inside the block of wood.
He is challenged by his clairvoyant memory
To discover the silent smile abiding within the wood
And so patiently he whittles
Precariously the chips spring out
In tight curls
Exploding with the new energy at their release.
This must be a creation without error
In these god-like matters
What is taken away cannot be replaced
Only one careless cut
And an ear or nose
Or some required symmetry is lost
The carver’s intelligent fingers
Ply and play and explore the wood
As masterfully as the pianist
Relentlessly searching
The soul of a Mozart concerto.
If You Were King
If you were King
Your most mundane desires
Would be an imperative for swift action
Your most dull and imperfect witticisms
Would be responded to with patronizing and complimentary laughter
You would be paid homage
For the slightest imperfect observations
Your most trivial malady
From hangnail to headache to unpleasant itch
Would receive prompt concern and therapy.
On your worst day
When you had done nothing
And nothing was quite right
A day when age or temperament
Had pierced your forehead with furrows
And your vanishing hair struggles for definition
The flattery of the hoards would be relentless.
For all your failures and deficiencies
You would be the benefactor
Of false commendations
Perjured benedictions
Insincere approbations
And patronizing acclaim
Tributes and applause and adoration
Would be offered abundantly
However only
If you were King.
The Bricklayer
The brownstones of Manhattan
Standing at attention side by side
Cutting the sky in long vertical pieces
And cottages
Squatting on sculpted hills
And cathedrals
Proclaimed by gods and popes and kings
Piercing the sky
With fingered steeples
Have felt the bricklayer’s crafted and gifted hand.
The adroit bricklayer
With a majestic sleight of hand
Lathers the brick
With a keen and certain eye
And with a majestic choreographed swirl of mortar
As fastidiously as the surgeon’s certain hand
Gathers the excess mortar as the next brick slides in place.
With relentless patience
One brick upon another
One brick upon another
Each precisely positioned
Creating fabrics of walls and arches
And cantilevered ledges
Flamboyant facades
Precarious arches
Graciously defying gravity
With the relentless ritual
Of one brick upon another
One brick upon another
With certain and sturdy discipline.
Michelangelo would smile broadly
Admiring the acute eye
And sleight of hand of these masters
His peers
The bricklayers
Who were not building walls and staircases
And portals
But were building cathedrals.
Jake at Five
Look at those now dexterous hands
That once jammed square pegs into round holes
And round into square
Look at those once duck waddling legs
That now fly across lawns and fields
With the swiftness of a gazelle.
He has taken measure of the world
And set secret silent objectives
On how much play is needed
To improve performance standards on “bug bingo”
And the achievable attainable height of Lego walls
The length of time to lick an ice cream cone
Before it melts on fingers and floor
His curiosity is Magellan.
His interests are Da Vinci.
His fantasies are Seuss.
His imagination is Disney
His possibilities are Spiderman.
His potential is cosmic and undefined
He has chosen what arouses his passion
Exercised discretion as to what pleasures him
He is generous and unfair
Patient and unrelenting
Thoughtful and demanding
Caring and difficult
Untutored and wise
What a wonderful most wonderful mystery he is!
His anger is sometimes quick and piercing
His laughter explodes and ricochets off the walls
As exuberant as a morning lily grasping at the sun.
He broadcasts his voice
As relentlessly as a twenty-four-hour FM station
He does not so much talk to himself
As he announces to the world
His real time stream of consciousness
And his observations of the world
Comparable to on line and real time psychoanalysis.
His eyes are intense and intelligent
And wondrously inquisitive
Pushing curiosity to its outer bounds
Questions are preceded by a curious frown
Laughter is prefaced by eyes exploding
Just milliseconds before
The corners of his mouth come into play.
As with every mother’s child
He is the one most beautiful child in the world
And with amazement and wonder
And curiosity and joy
We watch his journey
His oars are in the water
His destination beyond the next hill
Beyond the curve of the horizon
Latent and unknown and to be explored.
He is less than perfect
And yet impossible to improve
If all this is true
In the early midst and brink of his life
And if our joy were exponential
We should literally explode
To be passengers on his journey through life.
Juliet at Two
There is a silent rapture
In watching her observe her world
Her eyes are the navigation system
Announcing her flirting interests
With anything that moves or is movable
Or is to be explored and touched
And all that is firm and steadfast
Is of equal interest
One wonders what she thinks
As she wanders and wonders
The mysteries of the house
We can imagine her espousing:
Oh, the joy
Oh the joy that this is all mine.
Emotions parade across her face in milliseconds
The joy of a hug
The impatience for a toy
Not made available in something less than a heartbeat
The curiosity of a door knob
Perked ears for an unfamiliar sound
Grasping for something and anything
Appearing or apparently
Designed to be out of her reach.
Her energy seems boundless
As if supercharged by an endless
Supply of cosmic ether
And in less time than a blink
Of a chameleon’s eye
She sleeps
On her mother’s breast
Caresses her father’s muscled arms
Navigates her brother’s lap
Shares the warmth of the cat
Lying a cat breath away.
They are all her north star
For both fair and foul weather ports
As she plows through the deep sea of living
Circumnavigating the first two years
Of her journey through life.
Lake Compounce
(Remembrance of John Maghini)
We were young men together
Because of the circumstance of our age and birthdates
We were nineteen
And the circumstance of a war in Korea
Caused us to be drafted and meet for the first time
In Fort Dix New Jersey
Two first generation Italian American guys
One from Connecticut and one from New York.
After Army Basic Training
We crossed an ocean
Sardined together with several thousand others
In a Second World War troop ship
A ship protesting with aches and grunts
And desperate for salvage
After taking too many trips for too many days
Across the Pacific.
Shortly before the final guns
Were silenced by peace and stalemate
We arrived and spent a year and a half
Wandering the dirt roads of Korea
Where time was an endless commodity
And we did not admit to being homesick
But counted the days.
John was both poet and storyteller
He spoke of Lake Compounce in Bristol
Buried in the mid-section of Connecticut
Among endless pleasant small villages
Lake Compounce is an amusement park
With a magical dance hall and band stand.
He defined his life as getting through the week
In order to begin living
For Saturday night and Lake Compounce
The Dorsey’s and Charlie Spivak and Ralph Flanagan
And Glenn Miller without the great Glenn Miller
The band men in cool jackets and DA haircuts
The girls one prettier than another
Every song known through Juke Box savvy
Each Sunday morning recalling
The sound and joy and exhilaration of Saturday night
And the expectation of the next Saturday Night.
We completed our eighteen months in Korea
And lived the better part of our lives
With occasional contact and meetings
The stories and memories of Lake Compounce
Lay dormant but not forgotten.
More than a half century later
With marriages and children and careers behind us
Some accomplishments and some disappointments
I visited John in his assisted living home
Surrounded by summer trees and our wintered memories
We sat and talked in his room
He commented about his leg pains and bowel movements
And I shared a few of my disfunctions
He spoke of the one final good drunk concluded
Many distant years before
That caused him to quit drinking in perpetuity
Not pretending one more time to quit as in the past
But the final once and binding drying out.
His once massive head of hair
Was still well defined by the hair line of his youth
But there were much less trees in that forest
Whereas my hair was an empty plain
We were reflective about our recollections
Of our lives and our youths
John was quiet for a moment
I asked him to tell me about Lake Compounce.
His eyes filled with laughter and joy
Long before his mouth followed with a large smile
The wrinkles on his forehead disappeared
His eyes sparkled and the voice was firmer
He was young again
It was Saturday Night at Lake Compounce
And the Big Bands never sounded better
The names of some of the bands escaped his memory
He spoke of the pretty young ladies
And the days when hit songs were recorded on vinyl
The anticipation of preparing for Saturday nights
The memories cascaded in one long monologue
Requiring no interruption or prompting
He nurtured and invigorated pleasant distant memories
It was joyful for the storyteller
It was a gift and poignant and touching for the listener.
John was poet and storyteller again
And Lake Compounce
Was an ageless time
And a magical and extraordinary place
It was a memorable slice of his life.
The visit came to an end
The afternoon sun was slanted on the horizon
John had generously skipped his afternoon nap
His half smile failed to disappear
We embraced and I parted
In the parking lot I looked up at his window
With a silent appreciation for the gift he just gave me
The joy of a shared memory
And with no premonition of our next visit.
A few months later I made my occasional call
To the nursing station that would call John
A pleasant voice hesitated a long moment
Explaining some privacy issues
I explained our long friendship
Then she hesitated and revealed: he was gone
Not moved to another room-- but gone
Not released to go home again-- but gone.
God love you my friend John
Enjoy your eternal visit to Lake Compounce
Where the Big Bands will never sound better
And the young ladies are all pretty
Glenn Miller will put you in the mood
And Saturday night
Will be the one day of the week
To last forever.
Everyone should have a Lake Compounce in their life.
Sweet and Gentle Lady I
(Remembrance of Berta Omuleski)
The flowers sit still and expectant
In their ambers and reds and blues and pinks
Among the carpets of green
Awaiting the touch of your patient hand.
The air is quiet
The water laps and lingers
At the bulkhead of your backyard
Awaiting your footstep.
The palms dance in the wind
Prayerfully genuflecting to the memory
Of your last sojourn
To view their green drooping fronds
That once reached to tickle the belly of the sky.
Your chair has the imprint of your last visit
And now protests being unoccupied
Where it so often gently embraced you
In your quiet slumbers.
The phone sits silent
Awaiting your soft voice
Announcing you helloes
Broadcasting your laughter
Proclaiming your goodbyes.
Pictures hanging on muted walls
Of faces you loved
And revered mementoes
Await patiently for your radiant gaze.
The congregation of flowers and palms
And water and chair and mementoes
Photos of those who have loved you
Have lived in your bright eye
And now deprived of your tender presence.
Embrace your God
And hand in hand
Go quiet in your long night
Sweet and Gentle Lady.
Sweet and Gentle Lady II
(Remembrance of Kate Soehner)
(Kate died just short of her 90th birthday. She lived and loved painting for most of her life.
A website celebrating some of her paintings is available at katesoehner.com or just enter her name Kate Soehner.)
Flowers genuflect with early morning dew
Meditate and wait silently in her front yard
Awaiting her care and tender hand
The squirrel that unpredictably meanders
Outside her bedroom
Searches the glass door for her smiling glance.
Her eclectic paintings peek from muted walls
Depicting faces and cats and warm Floridian landscapes
Patiently painted with water colors and pastels and oils
With her certain and sometimes painful hands
Now the paintings search for her bright eye
That gave them birth and eternal life.
Her corner bedroom chair
From which she navigated her world
The chair that so gently embraced her
In her peaceful slumbers
Still has the imprint of her last sitting
And protests silently her absence.
The feline paraphernalia of her two loves
Samantha and Gabriella
Populate the kitchen and sunroom floors and tables
Where the three of them once congregated inseparably
Watching through sun drenched windows
The green expanse of yard and trees
And sharing quiet moments of unconditional love.
The pantry and food shelves
Filled with dog eared and food stained recipes
And exotic condiments and once shiny pots
Stand idle as they await her patient hands
The gaze of her keen eye
And her endless search to cook another
Adventurous and aromatic and delicious concoction.
The phone sits patiently and silently
Awaiting her soft voice
Announcing her gracious hellos
Broadcasting her robust laughter
And proclaiming her cheerful goodbyes.
Now—yes-- now
The chorus and accolades
Of flowers and butterflies and chair
And squirrel and cats and recipes
And paintings and phone
All the ubiquitous stuff of her life
That populated her intensely lived in home
Are now deprived of the tender blessing
Of her voice and hand and presence.
Sweet and Gentle Lady
You are ever present in our memories
You have in some special pleasantly devious way
Enhanced our lives and broadened our understanding
Of unconditional love.
Dear Kate
Embrace your God
And hand in hand go quiet and with courage
To new water colored skies
And pastel colored dreams
And eternally bright van Gogh colored fields
Voyage into your gentle and tender night
Sweet and Gentle Lady.
More Humble Than When He Parted
We must commend his artfulness
And simplicity of words
When speaking
Of possums and peanuts and politics and poetry
All painted in the simple words and vernacular
Of hardworking farmers and small towns thoughts
He has lived and listened and remembered well
Recalling the world as it was
Reconciling and rationalizing how it is different
And in some paradoxical contradiction
It is all the same.
His father fashioned and forged him
With a firm eye and certain hand
He has climbed impenetrable mountains
Walked known and unknowable roads of the world
With a stride nurtured
By the certain and relentless pace of Plains.
He traveled roads he could not have imagined
He still recalls the touch of his father’s firm hand
That disciplined and shaped
His strong and gentle hand.
He crossed the country roads from Plains
To see the world
And returned a different man
But unchanged
More humble than when he parted.
Jimmy Called
(Remembrance of Jimmy Donnelly)
Jimmy called
It was Friday in the evening
It was early Spring
And warm days were not yet plentiful
He explained his impatience and self-imposed anxiety
To welcome these early days of Spring
By launching the boat he cherished
There was excitement in his voice
Inviting me to assist in the launch the next day.
The boat lay waiting patiently and expectantly
Ten miles or so away in a marina
It the Spring cold waters of Long Island Sound
In the black watered harbor in Portchester
I shared my disappointment that I could not make it
Decades of time and possibly the need to dispel the memory
Prohibit my recalling why I could not join him
But we agreed we would sail together another day
After the primal launch the next day.
With unplanned coordination and syncopation
We were the same age
We were young together
He was in the Coast Guard and I in the Army concurrently
We hunted small game in nearby woodlands
And drank our first beers together
And collected Liberty Head nickels and other rare coins
And dreamed and imagined together
Of half developed expectations of our lives
Almost in parallel we courted and married
And fathered sons
Our first children
And struggled to find work and careers
It was the mid- Fifties
And more than a half century ago.
That Saturday
The happenstance of weather and a cold front
Turned the day cold
Later in the afternoon
The cold black phone rang ominously to reveal
Jimmy swam in the cold water as friends watched
Because the boat lay buoyed
Too many yards from the dock
And the black cold water
Consumed his last breath
He disappeared in the abyss of water and
And was recovered cold and blue and breathless.
The funeral was in his father’s and mother’s home
In the front parlor
The furniture moved out
And replaced by folding chairs along the wall
His father had bestowed to Jimmy
His red Irish face with an angular nose
Jimmy often wore a half smile which quickly exploded
Into a warm and pleasant façade
And now an inkling of that smile still remained
On his now solemn and strangely peaceful face.
The room was lit and shadowed
By a single window in the room
There were no appropriate words to speak
To his parents and siblings
Emotions settled in the back of the throat
And in the deep recesses of the heart
His young wife had no preparation
For this ordeal
Many attending were young and facing their first loss of a friend
We experienced desperate emotions
To see him and hesitantly reach to touch his hand.
Six decades in recollection
Of that cold spring day and bobbing boats
And cold black water
And there is a quiet urge
To revisit the memories over distant decades
Memories of a now ageless friend
His face is eternally young and red cheeked
And his warm smile
Shall never be changed by an aging façade.
It is not known where his wife has spent her life
After a year or so she married and moved
Time and circumstance have broken all ties
His son would now be sharing the same age
As my first-born son
One wonders if the years
Would have sustained our friendship
And sharing being old together
Feeling blessed and fortunate
By the gift of our advanced age and shared memories
Revisiting and assessing our youthful dreams and expectations
Recalling the stuff of life we have accumulated
Sharing the accomplishments of family and careers.
It is all speculation.
I escaped the initial trauma of that ominous day
By not being there that Spring day
To liberate the boat from the long winter
But there is no escape
From the memory of what happened
And what could have been
When the phone rang
And I heard his voice for the last time when
Jimmy called.
The Putt
The ball sits still on the green
The divot had made a small crater where it landed
And deposited a piece of turf
Where it hit and gently spun to a stop
A slight piece of turf dotting the upper hemisphere of the ball.
A bronzed hand reaches for the ball
The ball is properly marked with a Lincoln-headed penny
Gold and shiny in the sun
The ball is wiped on a towel
And replaced before the penny
And positioned so its logo is directly behind
To define the track of the intended path.
The afternoon sun paints a shadow
From a tall pine across the line
Like a hunchbacked ogre
The golfer does a circuitous three hundred and sixty-degree journey
Mapping the green’s contours
Reading each of the four coordinates
The wind is factored by the flight of the flag
And its brush against the skin
The attraction of the nearby water is factored
The golfer mentally grinds the tactics and contradictions
Of the facts and fictions of this mass of information.
The putter is managed by the tweaking
Of the thumbs and fingers of each hand
Concessions and commitments are made to the read
The line is selected and reservations ignored or endorsed
The player engineers the stance
With thoughtless rote
All that is needed is an iPhone app
Or a level or gyroscope or GPS device.
For a long moment stillness dominates
The clubhead is in line with the hole
The head and body are quiet
The stroke comes back slowly and stabs the ball
The golfer strokes
The ball charges and meanders
And one foot from the hole appears is committed
A clunk
A devious smile
A masterful double bogie.
On in Regulation
(Remembrance of Tony Puleo)
The greens are soft from yesterday’s rain
The sun is muted as it silhouettes the palms
Two egrets tip toe through the greenside pond
Like pristine sentinels guarding the slightly sloped green
The flag is limp as the wind takes a deep breath.
Those brilliant bronzed hands that catered to tubes and meters
For countless thousands approaching anesthesia
Guiding them softly into a deep sleep
Those same tender hands that stroked
Sons and daughters guiding them through life
Those hands that often clasped in prayer
Or carefully fingered worn rosary beads
Those tutored hands now caress an eight iron
And with a measured eye
And no need for consulting a marker for yardage
He calibrates his practiced swing
To precisely one hundred yards
And then mentally retools to factor in the touch.
He swings with precise repetition
Hogan would have smiled in confirmation
About a powerful repeating swing
The club head pinches the ball and grass seamlessly
The flight is low and precise and relentlessly accurate
The egrets blink slightly
As the ball hits the green
And tip toes two soft bounces to within birdie range.
Those competent practiced hands relax their grip
A slight grin creases the bronzed face
The wind exhales
The pin stands at attention.
One egret seeks flight
And quietly applauds with flapping wings
The other egret blinks multiple times in admiration.
The walk to the green is invigorating
Those dark piercing and intelligent eyes sparkle
As he thinks how wonderful
Oh how wonderful
To be on in regulation.
Sweet and Gentle Lady III
(Remembrance of Esther Seelig)
Sweet and Gentle Lady
You shall be ever present in our memories
You have in some special pleasantly devious way
Enhanced our lives and broadened our understanding
Of unconditional love.
Your generosity of spirit and sharing
Have given new definition to the word
Your unending good deeds were done
With persistence and steadfastness and joy
Always a giver and never a taker
And every challenge was engaged without complaint
In every road you walked you left footprints
In every heart you engaged your love shall reside eternally.
You have embraced your God
And hand in hand gone quietly and with courage
To new water colored skies
And pastel colored dreams
And eternally bright van Gogh colored fields.
Voyage into your gentle and tender night
Leaving all of us an enormous residue of love and joyful memories
Dear Esther
God Love You
Sweet and Gentle Lady.
The Painters Reality
Picasso places eyes side by side
Legs and arms akimbo
And body parts dismembered
Ignoring dimensions and reality
He challenges and redefines reality
Defying the norms of skeletal structure and sensibilities
A single eye peers in silhouette
Observing a distant new reality.
Van Gogh paints sunlight
Expanding its cosmological palette
Redefining the texture of the sunlight
The envy of the solar system
Defining cosmic swirling stars
Juxtaposed purples and yellows
Switching identities and realities.
Monet’s misty ambiguity of light
With the slimmest suggestion of impressions
Taking a step away or closer redefines the panting
Pokes the eye of reality
Making the viewer blink
Painting a cathedral
So that seasons and time of day
Redefine the reality of its façade.
They have done this not to make a living
But to define what is living
To play with reality
To define or re-define what is trivial
And what is essential and non-essential
Each with their own delineation of reality.
He Spoke in Rigid Hemingwayesque Sentences
He spoke in rigid Hemingwayesque sentences
Compressed in little packets of thoughts and observations
Rationed as if words were pricy and scarce
Enunciating and speaking deliberately
As if every sentence were online and real time and edited
Dispensed cautiously to avoid any overload
Minimized to its precise lowest common denominator.
Staccato blasts of words in careful syncopation.
The words were rationed
As scarce as water in the summer Serengeti
He spoke as one would write
Including all the punctuation
Highlighted by pauses and careful parsing of his breath and lips
And theatrical scrunching of the face
The slightest pause forms a casual comma
Holding the breath for one beat more for an abrupt semi-colon
Expressing the exasperation of an exclamation mark
And the poignancy of an idea complete with a harsh period.
Or an emphatic series of slashes of dashes.
He spoke as he would write
And too often the content of his dissertation
Was lost in the pleasure of his verbal performance.
Reflections of Lenny
(Remembrance of Lenny DiBenedetto)
When someone encountered Lenny approaching
Preceding his arrival with his outstretched hand
Was his generous and infectious smile
Creased across his lips
And the twinkle in his eye
The curling of his lip and that sleek moustache
Meticulously groomed and more than slightly elegant
With a certain debonair flair
His smile would arrive a millisecond before any physical encounter
Long before his hand grasped yours in greeting
His character and demeanor lived on his face
God knows he was a joy
And he was joyful.
He told old jokes with a new flair
He told new jokes with an old twist
He had the vocal accents and the facial mimicry
And as he aged so did his jokes
Some more gracefully than other
And the jokes became finely groomed and polished
Lenny told old jokes over and over
And friends enjoyed them over and over
Even if he asked “Did I tell you this one”
His friends would commit gross miscarriages of perjury
In anticipation of hearing an old joke for the Nth time
A well-told-many-times joke
That was as fresh as a newly crafted joke
Who are we to say a joke unlike a cat
Cannot have more than nine lives
Lenny generously searched each of the nine lives
Of many of his joke and challenged and tested their mortality
He was delightfully shameless in repeating jokes
And always with that enticing sparkle in his eye
The mortality rate for his jokes was non-existent
They lasted forever
The envy of cats
And his friends loved and cherished the charade
Of pretending each telling was the first.
He told many of the same jokes
And either we shared diminishing memories
As we guffawed as robustly as the first time
Of the known and anticipated punch lines
Brightly polished and robust
By the many trips to the palate of his mouth
With the gusto and tempo of his unique delivery
If jokes had frequent flyer mileages
Lenny could have flown first class to Heaven.
Those who knew him well
Can close their eyes and imagine him speaking
With that tantalizing gleam in his eyes
The corners of his mouth
Bracketing his curled lip like two giant commas on his cheeks
The bristle of excitement as he shared a welcome
The inevitable embrace with words and a handshake
Or a story or topic of the day
His habitual offer of “God Bless”
We shall all carry his last God Bless
As a badge of anointment
It was Lenny’s final Hail Mary for us all.
Lenny had all of the G’s
He was generous, gentle, gentile, gentlemanly
He had all of the H’s
He was humorous, humble, hearty, hammy, huggable
He had all the C’s
He was comedic, commanding, complex, caustic, cool
He had all the P’s
Pleasant, pleasing, practical, passionate, peaceful, peppy
One could imagine that in his complexity
He certainly was not perfect
Kathy could vouch for his imperfections
But imperfect with a pleasant twist
And a predictable nature
He was a complex man
For no one can simplify the world
With humor and humanity
Without amplifying and digesting its complexity
And diligently broadcasting the truth.
The name Di Benedetto is appropriate for Lenny
In its Italian tradition and language
Di: has several meanings including “Of” and “From”
Bene: means “well”
Detto: means “spoken”
In translation his name is appropriately “well-spoken of” or “well spoken”
God knows Lenny was well spoken
We must envy the heritage of his being named so appropriately
When so few of us are anointed with powerful names
We are Bakers that do not bake and Cooks that do not cook
And Carpenters that do not Carpenter
Possibly he generously acquired the challenge of his name
As a motivator and goal
We must wonder if Lenny adapted and became the name
Or did the name make Lenny who he was
We shall never know nor resolve the wonder
Lenny was Lenny and that was a given.
He was loved well by the love of his life Kathy
Who laughed more heartily and more times
At more jokes than a clubhouse full of drunken golfers
God knows and blesses her patience
And enthusiasm for being his best and most indulgent audience
He loved his dog Jackson
They were comrades and friends and companions
Who could finish other’s people-dog sentences
We can imagine Jackson patience and longing
When Lenny’s final absence turned out to be eternal
And Jackson awaited
The sound of his voice and the warm touch of his hand.
Paraphrasing a Ben Franklyn witticism
A man has three friends: a wife and a dog and money
Ben Franklyn was wise
Lenny was generously blessed
With a beloved wife and a dog
Though there is some speculation
That Jackson did not know or think he was a dog
If a dog is man’s best friend
Then Jackson high energy excitement and love of Lenny
Must redefine the trite old adage
Lenny’s best friend is a dog
Except for Kathy.
Lenny and Kathy enjoyed the vista of the White Mountains
They searched the mountain view
The home was a piece of land and a piece of their hearts
Looking across the valley
Watching one mountain leaning on the other across the skyline
The morning sun shining on the cold glistening snow
Long sweeps of forests cascading across the valleys
In the evening long shadows diminished the mountain views
Awaiting sunrises peaking across the morning sky
Springtime flowers climbing up the hills
And introducing the flow and cascade of the seasons.
Lenny had a joy and love for life
He wore that joy on his face and in his demeanor
It lived in the gusto and tempo of his conversations
He had a devil of a sense of humor
And apparently a pleasant angelic countenance
But we must imagine he was no angel
No not our Lenny
But we shall beatify him as an angel
Why not repay his generosity to all of us
We must speculate he was pleasantly imperfect
Just the way we expected him to be.
There is an adage about Mother Teresa
On the day of Redemption
God puts His gentle arm around her and says:
“Thank you, but you could have done a little more”
Yes Mother Teresa could have done a little more
For Lenny the admonition from God would be Lenny
“Thank you, but you could have told a few more NEW jokes”
And this caution would brighten more than a few hearts
Delivered a few more laughs that may turn to tears
And Lenny would laugh like hell
There in Heaven being so challenged
In the company of Mother Teresa
One can imagine you can laugh like hell in Heaven
You must do what you do no matter the turf
There is an old anonymous saying
“He deserves Paradise who makes his companions laugh”
That being true they are lined up in as Lenny enters saying
“Did you hear the one about St. Peter….“
God will love and hold this gentle man.
Many of us knew Lenny for too few short years
Age and circumstances and the magnet
Of warm Florida winters brought us together
In our shared retirement in the south side of our lives
Many of us knew him for too brief a time
We can feel regretful about his loss
But we must all feel blessed that he came our way
And in more quiet moments we can ask
As we should about past friends
What gifts did he give and leave us
How did he manipulate our emotional DNA
What pleasant memories did he leave
How distinct were his footprints on our lives
All who knew him will be affirmatively serviced by their memories.
We need not encourage him to be our friend
He wore his friendliness comfortably and generously
He offered friendship unabashedly
There was no pretense about his humor
It was offered pleasantly and agreeably and outrageously
To be suckled and enjoyed and exploited
It is said that much of what is humor
Is about the search for truth
Lenny was relentless in his humorous search for truth
And his harvest was bountiful.
We are all better in our lives
For embracing our lives and our hearts with Lenny
If we are to be judged on how well we select our friends
Lenny can make us all look very accomplished
Because he afforded his friendship boundlessly
And we were all benefactors of his generosity.
His limericks fell from his mouth with the gusto
Of an Irish reel on a Saturday night
With the staccato delivery of a Gilbert and Sullivan lyric
He was unabashed in his joy in the recitation
And the stabbing punctuation of the punch line
He enjoyed the punch line before he spoke it
Which was usually preceded by his laughter
Regardless of his telling for the umpteenth time
We loved his shamelessness entertaining
He would start “There once was a ……”
We loved the way he flirted with the words and phrases
And was spot on with the cadence.
Lenny came and lived and loved and left us
He gave the world a little nudge in the right direction
And left the world a little better than he found it
And the laughter in heaven
Will be raised a few microscopic decibels
Considering Lenny will have to sacrifice
Some of his best off color humor
Thank God he passed our way
God love and bless
This Good Man
This Gentleman
This Gentle Man.