....Collected Poems...of Wayne Noone
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_______________________________________________________ For Anthony Hey Boss On the beach Shoes off In the sand with the taste of onions and olives and the sound of the balalaikas Life and death are the same Hey Boss Let's dance Spare Parts My uncle Joe lived in a brown shingle house built by my grandfather across the railroad tracks from the Sipes Paint Factory where he worked till it closed in 1975 forcing him to take a job as a janitor. He spent his free time with a man called Bobby Habjanetz, his friend from childhood who was known as Skudgie, a short very fat man but nonetheless with a deeply creviced face like a desiccated fruit and a sad kindness. When I was a boy and Joe and me were walking in the woods near his house he said to me see that jug on the hill up there? gesturing to a hillside around fifty yards away. Me squinting with coke-bottle glasses on my fat face couldn’t see a thing but heard distinctly the sound of breaking glass as Joe cleanly shattered it with a rock. In the workshed behind the house my uncle kept the skull of a vagrant he had retrieved from potter’s field and shellacked a grimy brown. I used to work my way through the sawdust past the implements and the anvil to look at it trussed by copper wire to the rafters, half the cranium and part of the mandible shattered. Although he never married and sired no children, Joe serviced a woman named Diane, birdlike, smoking, and shaking with alcohol, for her witless husband who called my uncle spare parts, since the husband in addition to being addled was impotent. Taking a walk along the tracks as he liked to do on summer evenings Joe, feeling the dark and heavy pain which announces a heart attack, began to run up and down the steep slope of a nearby slate dump while pounding his heavy chest and in that instance cheated death. But in 1992 not having seen him for several days Skudgie entered my uncle’s house and found him sprawled on the kitchen floor atop the newspapers he would spread across the linoleum his legs swollen and turning black. Skudgie weeping at the funeral said we lost him now and got lost himself less than a month later. For Helen Old Polish babka, I see you on the fourth of July In your lawnchair on the front yard Watching the fireworks, Your face upturned and open In the festive light. When my father and I Combated the demons of drink By battling each other You, hearing our frequent rage Told me once You shouldn't fight with your father, You shouldn't fight. Now a red sign like a stigma Hangs from your screendoor: Oxygen. I see your daughter on occasion Hanging clothes in the back. Congestive heart failure she says. I know not what chariot will come To put an end to your choking And carry you away. But know that for some time to come I will remember, and Carry in my pocket the feathers Of your raspy voice. Pan When the heat brings the sap up and the world goes green and the hot sun makes the sweat trickle like pee down the young girls' thighs, I come forth. Naked, save for my dove gray ten gallon stetson and lime green alligator boots, my belly huge and swollen, a great pregnancy sloshing low below the lip of my neon blue speedo, the hair growing coarse like quills down my back to give the gals purchase for the fuck. I am the great god Pan, and I am sweat and gusto and life forever. I'm the rash on your crotch and the blood that spews from a boxer's mouth, and, having traded my pipes for a Marsh Wheeling, I walk into every Bally's Spa and along every topless beach, I travel the malls and the boardwalks grinning through my beard and singing "Ladies, take a number!" Unaccountably After a morning like every other where the bald guy boards the bus and sits on the horizontal seat across from the driver the one reserved for handicapped the bald guy who looks like Mr. Drucker from Petticoat Junction but without Drucker's dead eyes his eyes are leering and crazy though as I recall Drucker's eyes used to get a little life in them when those Petticoat Junction girls would come around the store and each morning has to move when we reach Forsythe the blind guy's stop and the driver yells out 38C Greentree in that voice reserved for the blind and Drucker has to move across the aisle to free up the handicapped seat and the blind guy gets on with his seeing eye dog a great German Shepard who every morning as he passes Drucker is dying to sniff him but just tests his knee cause after all he's working and the blind guy maneuvers the dog under him and the dog sits patiently like the blind guy staring across the aisle at Drucker with gray unseeing eyes till we come to Carriage Park where every day a parade of Hindus board the bus along with David a mongoloid crewcut with pants jacked up who gets on the bus to the loud greetings of Hi David in that voice reserved for idiots and the elderly which triggers David's daily monologue each statement punctuated with Right?-unaccountably after I get off the bus at the Post Gazette Building and walk up First Street to Chancery Lane I see two large mallards on the sidewalk one female clad in speckled brown one male with emerald head shaking themselves vigorously shaking off the rain and the riverwater from the Monongahela nearby. Bishop Hughes' Cabin Exploring the terrain behind Bishop Hughes' Cabin find two box turtles fucking on a brown rock which deepens the mystery Four AM God I think it's coming up the stairs little thing like a doll taking one step at a time making a squeaking sound. Instruction You should find the body in the fall, in late October, maybe or November, when frost coats brown pods and grass crunches underfoot. When you find it dried in clothing from a happier season, take the gun from out its hand and understand Forlorn That place behind the alley near your house the lonely place with the cracked screen door, rusted pieces of air conditioner, broken downspouts, chips of whitewash on gray wooden slats, weeds around the busted concrete steps, or maybe another place, a place you haven't seen but know about, like the roadside near the Tonidale Exit, overgrown with tufts of weeds sticking up through the black gravel, shattered green bottles, old paint cans, maybe a hubcap. The way the light hits, sometimes the hot sun in the full face of day, or maybe gray light in the alley at sunset, it calls your attention, and you hear the buzzing of bees and feel like you're going to pass out. You know these places, they're where the souls go. Resume Born anno domini 1955. Father: Surname Dvorak, claims legimate patrilineal descent from papist Catholics. Generations later our Hungarian great-grandfather steps into the light of day having renounced the church and abjured the Trinity. Mother: God's bread ground fine by lion's teeth, lying in bed she hears his snores thinking how, how could he have done this thing? Me: Seeking a life of isolation sans television or phone. Diet of boiled vegetables, eggs in moderation, occasional piece of roasted meat. Wearing gray suits of linen or wool. Recogizing women only by their hair, never looking at their faces. Listening to birds one note at a time. On To Page 6 .............. Return To Other Poets This site sponsered by 
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