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Steve McCleery
He
made me feel like I was part of something
in
a way I’d never felt before and have not felt
since.
Part of a community.
I
close my eyes and can see a red apple,
but
not a community.
I
picture that word on a billboard,
myself
climbing up
and
putting “our” before “community.”
It
was our community because of him:
Our
grass, shrubbery, trees, our corners,
windows,
and doors. Never his,
always
ours because “ours” was his goal.
We
were his goal, each individual.
Never
a command, always a suggestion:
Be
yourself,
as,
in his acts of kindness, he transformed
I
into we, me into an us we owned.
The
walls and floors and doors
of
our community. The podiums
from
which, when he said one name,
all
others knew that person,
what
they did, what they liked,
and
didn’t like. So many people,
our
public selves, each part of the whole
because
of him.
What
I have today, the roof over my head,
the
food on my table, I have because of him.
Many
of us can say that.
“I
made me, he made me who I am,”
Somewhere,
each says, as I say.
I
close my eyes and see a black horse
in
a green pasture,
but
not a paradox. The I-made-me-
he-made-me
contradiction was part
of
the ordinary that lay within our lives,
beneath
our hands as we opened
and
closed doors, some with plates
in
which were engraved our names,
and
one door with his name,
that
was his door and ours.
And
is and will be.
I
close my eyes and see us, seated
in
tiers in an auditorium. Steve
is
on the stage at the podium, and he is
seated
in the center, two places at once.
For
Your Listening Pleasure
Dennis
knew the sounds.
A
Saturday afternoon we’d hitchhike
into
Hackensack and there he’d be
on
a stool behind the counter
in
a corner of the Relic Rack
as
soon as we walked through the door.
Dennis
in purple and black,
a
short-sleeved, buttoned-down
purple
shirt, clean-shaven,
with
delicate features, brown eyes,
brown
hair slicked back.
Behind
him, on the turntable a forty-five
spinning:
"Moonlight,” by the Vanguards,
on
a green label, its name I forget.
In
the Relic, forty-fives in paper sleeves
covered
the walls, some forty-fives,
such
as "Golden Teardrops,”
by
the Flamingoes, and "Stormy Weather”
by
the Five Sharps, rare, hard to find,
priced
higher than others. Dennis
knew
them all, and knew what we’d like
before
we even heard it, a bluesy item,
"219
Train,” by the Moonglows, a ballad,
The
Martels’ "Forgotten Spring.”
Dennis
was the keeper of the rhythm &
blues
kingdom, the long, narrow
Relic
Rack, owned by Eddie Gries
and
Don Feletti, who once in a while
popped
in, but their visits, especially Eddie’s,
were
occasional. Dennis, there full-time,
made
money for Eddie and Don.
We
couldn’t afford to part with fifty dollars
for
"Darlene,” by the Dreamers, on Grand,
or
twenty for "Off Shore,” by the Cardinals,
on
Atlantic. But we’d leave the Relic
with
forty-fives like "Lucille,” by the Drifters,
and
the Flamingos’ "That’s My Desire,”
that
increased in value through the years,
as
they became rare, hard to find.
I
spent a year in Vietnam and came home
to
find the best of my forty-fives
collection
gone, my brother had taken them
and
sold them for money for heroin.
What
I didn’t know was that Dennis, too,
was
"on heroin.” I don’t know if he was
all
those Saturday’s we’d go to the Relic,
in
the mid-sixties. But the late-sixties,
when
many people were doing heroin,
maybe
that’s when he started. By then,
I
was in the military, far from the Relic.
When
I frequented it, I knew little of Dennis,
only
what I saw, and, most of all, what
I
heard. He knew the good R&B sounds,
as
he sat in the corner, near the register,
behind
him, the turntable. I knew too
that
he lived not far from Hackensack,
in
Bogota, a town with lots of hills, trees,
and
old houses. I assume he went to school
there.
I don’t know if he graduated from
high
school. After I went into the navy,
I
don’t remember seeing him.
But
years after, when the Relic Rack
was
no more, and a different store,
with
records on the walls, had opened
down
the block from where the Relic was,
I
saw Dennis one more time. By then,
I
was "into” gospel music. I casually
mentioned
a group, the Swan Silvertones.
Dennis
said, "Oh, they’re the best.”
He
was wearing a black leather jacket
that
came to his waist, no longer
behind
the counter playing a Lamplighters
ballad
or an uptempo Jumping Jacks tune.
Phil
Spector had the Wall of Sound.
The
Relic was walls of sound. Dennis,
not
long after I saw him in that black
leather,
a little heavier, his face a bit fuller,
puffier,
became part of the silence none
of
us knows, or will, till we get there.
Pick
a Number
At
sixty-seven you would have found me
grading
freshman compositions,
Friday
afternoons, weekends, my corner
windowless
office a second home.
At
fifty-seven, Friday afternoons, you
would
have found me in a red truck
driving
from plains to high desert.
It
was on one of those Friday afternoons
I
learned in an email you’d left this world
of
your own volition, in Florida.
I
pictured you crawling into a leafy bush, like
an
igloo of foliage, and in that shady enclave
taking
your last breath, then and there,
or
perhaps in a hotel room, or on a dune
above
the Atlantic, or in a cluster of palms
off
a seldom-traveled path.
No
one can tell me. I’m speaking to the wall
I’m
sitting near, not to you. In a cafeteria
with
large windows, in the Ozarks
one
morning you were thirty-one,
and
I, thirty-three. Pushing seventy-eight
I
miss the classroom, my small corner office,
and
"our” cafeteria, a woman handing me
a
plate of biscuits and gravy.
Why
did you leave? All I’ve learned is
I
don’t go back, that even if I were to go back
to
the Ozarks, to the desert,
to
the classroom, I’d be going forward,
into
a dream, you in rumpled chinos,
a
wrinkled cotton shirt half-buttoned, brown
loafers,
ash-blond hair. The world
is
a mess. Loving my life, I love the world.
For
Michael Minassian
Their
Viking River cruise will begin
in
Budapest and end in Prague, in April,
when
the flowers are in bloom, I imagine,
my
sister, my cousin, their spouses
and
friends. But what flowers bloom
in
Prague I’d have to look up to find out.
Tulips
in Holland are peach, white, blue
in
my mind’s eye, and Prague is Kafka.
You
are in the South, and I the Southwest
United
States, who once were only two
children
two miles apart, you in Dumont,
I
in New Milford, neighboring towns years
before
we were the neighbors we are
on
Facebook. I’m not on Facebook now,
but
on my notepad app, tapping keys
of
memory that lead Madison Avenue.
In
a red and black Studebaker wagon,
my
mother at the wheel, we turn right
onto
Hillside Avenue. Pick up my aunt
and
my cousin and drive. The A&P,
on
Washington, bordered Bergenfield
and
Dumont. Flourescent light, boxes,
packages,
sacks on shelves, drew me in:
orange,
blue, and white sacks
of
Pillsbury flour, red and yellow boxes
on
Sunkist raisins, the bonneted lady
with
wavy dark hair, the Sunkist lady,
looked
like my neighbor in her tomato
garden;
the Animal Crackers boxes,
with
lions and giraffes behind bars;
and
coffee tins, the yellow-black Chock
full
o’Nuts; and boxes of Lipton’s tea.
Heaven,
I suppose, was packaging,
the
forms and colors men, in those days,
in
shirts and ties at tables in the City
brainstormed
for shoppers to take items
off
shelves and stack in metal carriages.
They
drew me in. I loved being there,
that
one weekday morning, the only one
of
its kind I recall, one day only.
But
Madison Avenue was never ending.
Do
you remember the bank with its pleated
white
columns on Madison and Washington?
Madison
was hills, one steep hill going from
my
town into yours. Other hills less steep,
the
whole drive like riding lulling waves.
That
one day at the A&P, my cousin may
by
chance recall, tourist shopping in Prague.
Peter Mladinic's most recent book of poems, The Whitestone Bridge, is available from Anxiety Press. An animal rights advocate, he lives in Hobbs, New Mexico, United States.
