....Collected Poems...of Wayne Noone
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_______________________________________________________ Promise Turn on the radio in darkness and hear again the news, this time two butchered, hit with bricks, followed by word of another crash and freeze, till I hear the word Afghanistan, unwind, and think of you, don't want you to hear this, want to plug your ears, let me hear it, let me keep vigil for you, let me take it on, I will be stronger in this, let me be the one to bear it. I promise I will lay such a curse on Bush and his cadre they will fall somehow fall, and with every ounce of magic in me, somehow, I will bring him safely home. Swallow a Crocodile I remember Mom in the Oncology Unit, how one day I came visiting same as usual to find her room empty, bed remade and waiting like a maw for the next one. Well, she wasn't dead yet, just moved to Cardiology with a mild attack to top off the cancer, but I was standing in that vacant room as if it were the only room on the ward or in the universe, then running, pushing aside the ambulators trailing their IVs, frantic to the nurse's station to find her, not giving two shits for the other cancer patients filling the rooms around me when all that mattered was one I loved was lost. It's the same for me now with him over there in this dumbest of all wars. I've never had much truck with others, their concerns are nothing to me, but the boy's room is empty and I need to find him on another floor and goddamn all the other mothers and fathers and to hell with the grief around me I have only heart enough for one. Msgr. Carroll Satterfield, S.T.D. ...... (1929 - 2003) I remember how you drove up from Baltimore each Tuesday night and would walk in at precisely nine the next morning, angled back and rapid, your watch unwristed and placed upon the lectern. Mulcahy Hall had no air in those days, yet we were shocked the day you, always the impeccable Baltimore gentleman priest, pulled off your rabat, stood there in clerical shirt and french cuffs, "don't want to ruin the suit, ah, there...." a glance around the room with those pale unblinking eyes, then you would begin: "Ah, Mr. Gervasio, last time I believe we were discussing the infused virtues and the concept of double justice, and what, ah, was Cardinal Contarini's position, ah, there...?" and it was Applied Redemption, or Christology, or Sacraments, how you stitched religion in our minds those four years and though you were a small man, to us you were enormous, and though most of my classmates were terrified, I thought you magnificent. And Monsignor, all those words you fired at us like God's own tommy gun, though their subtlety escaped me 25 years ago, gratia sanans, gratia elevans, delectio victrix, and most of all gratia efficax, can I tell you, can you still hear me, I think I understand them now. Christmas Sermon Coffee burns my mouth this morning, tobacco harsh against my throat, I have to hustle for the bus, body stiff and crusty with the cold and I just want to sleep. I don't know why they always find their way to me, there can be ten other available seats, like this one hobbling down the aisle on elephantine legs, wheezing, sick with a phlegmy cough, blown out in her black quilted Steeler coat and brown tossle. I think oh, god don't let her sit next to me as she zeroes in and sags her full bulk against me. But she smells like cookies, smiles sweetly as I excuse myself to get off at my stop. As the bus pulls away I light a Doral, smoke, then flick the butt into a slushpile, notice how the flame flares up brightly in that second before it is extinguished by the snow. Hi Kral Dear Kral, sorry to hear about Owl being ill, how'd he ever end up with diabetes and a heart condition anyway, you know I was wondering if you had an email address for him, I'm sure he must have a computer, heck I can remember when he was just a curate how he developed that silly tickler file to track the names of all the people in his parish so he could greet them Sundays after mass so he of all people must be high tech now and using a PC, you know, I just wanted to drop him a line to let him know I was thinking of him, and Kral, I'll just have to ask him if he still keeps that little pad in his shirt pocket surrounded by those two Cross Pens, remember us laughing at him the time Stoken pulled those out and threw them across the floor, we were always in his room eating those chips of his, Charlton Chips or something, that he had in a big can he kept in his closet, man I was always hungry then, you too remember, and how about that time that fella from Kentucky, Brad Wostle, came up against you in touch football and knocked you like a ping pong ball across Echo Field, he was a big son of a gun and mean too till we got to know him, those southern boys all seemed mean, like that Charlie with the French last name, the one who used to spend most of his time playing darts down in the rec room and would always be bending over and showing the plumber's crack of his fat ass, remember how they told us don't mess with him he's a Cajun, and we weren't really sure what a Cajun was or why we should be afraid of one, and that other kid from Owl's Diocese, the one who tried to hang himself in his room and I got pulled in by the Rector to help carry the stretcher and was late for Quinn's class so he zapped me soon as I walked in by asking me when was the Council of Nicea which of course all those St. Thomas boys like Owl knew, Quinn was always giving us grief, remember how ticked he was when we cut his class the day Lennon died and just sat in your room listening to Beatles tunes on that little cassette player of yours, how bout that time in the summer when Greb got us all up to Kane Hospital to give out water to the elderly and Rice wrote that article in the Catholic about Mustachioed Seminarians crossing picket lines, and remember how Saladna always said Basta! when he finished a class, I'll bet he's dead now, and Satter, how he'd always end a lecture at exactly 10 o'clock even if he was in mid-sentence, he's gone now too, remember Kral how when it was time to go how Byrd cried, holding his fat belly and draping his face with his beautiful long-fingered hand, hey, you know I saw Tom Bitner about a year ago, guess he works for some child care agency now, I was chairing a meeting and there must have been about fifty people in the room but I knew him right away and he never looked and me and I never looked at him and we never spoke but I knew we both knew the other was in the room, you know its weird Kral, we all know each other, the ones who leave, its like we're vampires or aliens or something, I swear if you turned off the lights in that room, Bitner and I, our hands would glow where old Bishop Leonard smeared the oil on our palms, and you probably still believe it was the speragis, the seal, but I think it has something to do with those times together and how they made us who we are, and sometime I'd like to write it all down, just get it out of my system in one big gulp, and maybe its like any other time for any other person, when you're young and unformed and life just starts to roll out for you and the world is greener than it'll ever be again, still I just want to yell one time from a mountain I was a young man once and I believed in things and I lived in a world of magic but it's all too much to say in a little message in an email. Bower Hill If the dead are left to bury the dead then maybe its for us the living to dig them up again. Let me tell you a story: In the old times, back in the days of knights and dinosaurs, men who worked in the mills, at least those of skilled labor, wore crisp white shirts. There was a locker room where at shift's end they would shower and change. My grandfather always wore a three piece suit, dark blue. As a little boy I remember him, retired and senile, sitting on the couch in the parlor watching Lawrence Welk, talking and waving to the TV. He no longer wore his suitcoat, but I can still see his long white sleeves and blue vest with a thin gold watch-chain. Once he called me and sat me next to him, wrapping his arm around me, and I could hear what he whispered to the television in a voice like a hum, insistent and repetitive, like the sound of yellowjackets under the sickle pear tree behind the house in August: "Love lost, victories lost, cruelty inflicted and cruelty incurred, I have as many children as Abraham but I do not know their names, one of your brothers buried in a shoebox, the other dying drunk on a couch, you stretched out like a filament between them. You are but one in a constellation of loss." I was just a boy then and didn't understand. Not too long ago I asked a dead man to tell me how it was, being dead. He said he could only speak to me by analogy. But he was just a gravedigger, his shirt was dirty, stained with soup and tobacco, don't pay him any mind. Ash Wednesday God makes the beautiful skies in the morning and God knocked that big dent in the heavy front bumper on the old van in the lot and it was God came up to me when I got separated from my mother in Loblaw's hair all gray and permed and lipstick smeared on withered lips and told me to quit crying you big baby but then God came up to me He must have been about sixty and asked me why I was crying and I said because I lost my mother and He said well let's go find her and took me by the hand hand till we found her at the meat counter ordering some ground round and I remember how we used to run into Bruce at Loblaw's on occasion doing a little shopping after work and the last time I saw him it was at St. Clair where they were regulating his heart medicine but two weeks later he was gone his last words being just wait wait a minute and my sister thought he was talking to her but he was talking to God but God He doesn't have a minute to spare He knows we're out of time and if the Jews have Yom Kippur and the Muslidim their Ramadan well I guess that leaves the Catholics with Ash Wednesday so God He goes to St. Mary of Mercy and there's Father O'Toole still looking pink and clean cut after all these years and he puts the ashes on God's forehead with the remember you are dust then God is right out the door in a big rush and catches the 36B Virginia Manor in front of the Post-Gazette Building knowing that soon as He gets home He'll have to use the bathroom and He's been ignoring the blood on the paper for some time now but He can't ignore it forever I guess and soon He'll have to admit to Himself that something's wrong wrong that it might be cancer cancer oh God Breakthrough I heard yesterday that Frank the security guard at Wood Street Commons shot himself and Robert the Messenger who told me said it got to be too much for him. Said they laid him out on a bed of white carnations, put a carnation in his hand. This morning they had Sinatra playing at the coffee shop, I've always hated that phony bastard's flat voice, yet it'll stick with me throughout the day, luck be a lady tonight. Seems to me a poem is like a spiderweb, or maybe like that wire mesh they used to insert between the plates of plexiglass in the windows of seclusion rooms, holding the glass together however splintered, never letting us reach the other side. My favorite poem My favorite poem was written by a man hanging in a mesh basket inches from his bed his belly pregnant with liver his skin his eyes turned the color of kiwi him reading the words on the wall as he stared past me his cracked lips mouthing the words as he wrote them holding not a pen but a morphine-drip dispenser incessantly squeezing out the Morse with his thumb. Plainfield Wisconsin 1957 He parks the truck outside the barn. The upholstery is split where his daddy's Remington leans between the dash and the wheel well. He works the hook behind the thick achilles just above the heel. There is gray callus like a horseshoe on the bottom of the foot. He takes off his stained brown work gloves and looks at his cracked hands. There is liniment in the house. He inserts the padlock through the clasp on the barn door, rubs the stubble on his chin, looks up at the November sky. He figures on snow. He walks from the barn to the house, hears the frosted soil crackle under his boots, thinks of the sound the hook made. He sits at the kitchen table and looks through the window at tan corn stalks in the distance. He opens a can of peaches. _______________________________________________________ On To Page 12 .............. Return To Other Poets This site sponsered by 
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