Pat in Heaven
Because he always said hello
Because on his daily walks
to combat diabetes he picked up trash
Because at home and on campus
at the school where he counselled students
he left wakes of beauty
Because his white shirts with the wine-red tie
loose at the collar were a little tight
because his wife Katie worked
in the public library and never was at social
gatherings, because they raised successful
kids, one a Merrill-Lynch stockbroker
Because he sat at a long table
at basketball games with the buzzer
keeping time, because he had two cocker
spaniels at home and in his wallet
pictures of grandkids he didn’t show
all the time, because he had a mole
like a thumbprint above his left temple
and white hair that looked like a toupee,
flat, a bit wavy, because he talked about
the school at night in the mountains
sitting in a foldout, beer in hand, around
a fire, because he knelt in a pew
in a church, black beads
snaked around his hand, lips whispering
prayers for the living, because he sat
on a hill at dusk as bats flew
in unison out of a cave, because he took
me into his heart
Franciscan Brothers
I’d hate being an editor,
all that yes or no over and over.
I couldn’t, well, if I had to.
An editor is like a priest.
Editors take a vow to read flakey poems.
Priests take a vow of celibacy.
If they break that vow, there’s hell to pay.
I’d hate being a priest. I never had a calling,
My calling wasn’t from God.
The devil tapped my shoulder,
put in his two cents
and made me do it: assume
a false identity. I wasn’t Art Vaught
but George Roth
wanting to know about the monastic life
of a Franciscan, a Jesuit, a Benedictine.
George’s mother thought he had a calling.
He was thinking about giving his life to God
not just as a lay person but hard core,
like marine bootcamp,
only it wasn’t a barracks bunk
but a bed of nails George would sleep on.
He was
entertaining the idea, so thought Edith Roth.
She projected: George
saying mass, George sitting in a dark
confessional,
pulling back a slot,
What are your sins? Up to this point
the only constructive
thing he’d done in his thirteen years
was to read
a biography of Teddy Roosevelt.
It was fun knowing those pamphlets and
brochures
from the Maryknolls, and the Brothers of
Mercy, would arrive and
be opened by George, or his mother.
Not time shares in Cabo but a life
within cloistered walls, from which he’d
emerge
to be called father, or brother.
The priest pulls back the slot and hears the
confession.
The editor opens the email or the snail mail
and reads the poem.
Years after assuming George’s identity,
I, Art Vaught, wrote “I Hate My Father.”
The workshop loved it
for its anger. They said let’s really see it!
They thought it had merit,
as did Edith, that her son had real potential.
And so he did.
Geography
In our basement classroom we studied
Switzerland, Peru, Brazil, France. Italy,
shaped like a boot. But don’t ask me about
Italy’s boot-heel. I liked dreaming Italy and
Portugal, but wasn’t keen on imports,
exports, sea levels, capitals. Our test,
a jumble of facts, I barely passed. Sister John
called our names by the grades we earned,
from A's to F’s. I walked up to the desk.
“By the skin of your teeth, Richard Brennan,”
she thrust the paper at me. I walked to my
inkwell desk in the back. We had this rickety
wooden floor, its slats buckled. Windows
opened and closed by a long pole. Its steel
fit into an eye in the window frame.
So you had to reach up with the pole.
I was never asked to. I guess Sister thought
I was too short I’d waste time. One day she
told me to go up to the corner, face the wall.
My back turned to the twenty plus students,
I felt far away, a small island off the coast
of Columbia. I met brothers, Peter and
Michael from Venezuela, but not in school.
In school, fourth grade, we were Irish, Polish,
Italian. Cesare, born in Italy, was small like
me. Unlike me he got A's in Arithmetic.
I failed arithmetic tests all the time. I only
stood in corner once. Up really close
to where the wall formed a corner. That’s all
Today I stand up front, in the center. Sister’s
big smooth hand, with a reddish tint, is on my
shoulder. “Richard Brennan, he made an A
on his attitude test. Tell them what you said,
Richard.” In my white shirt and green tie
I read: “I hate to fail, but I’m not afraid.”
Mary
This was 1966, and I suspect she was born
before 1910. Her face a bit wrinkled,
pinched, glasses, neither short nor tall,
neither heavyset nor especially thin, she
reminds me of Mary, a bar manager
I met some fifteen years later, only this
woman, the only woman in the warehouse
on the naval base in Cutler, had short grey
hair, whereas Mary’s was dyed black,
and she had a way of purring “More for you”
with pursed lips, so it sounded like a cat’s
meow when she thought someone wanted
another beer. This woman in Cutler
had Mary’s pinched face, only she didn’t
work behind a bar but in the office
that led out to the warehouse. Also there
in the office were seaman Dennis O’ Connor,
Lieutenant J.G. Cutter, and Chief Alvarez,
who, like the woman in the office, was
pleasant, even cheerful, once joking to us
in the warehouse the familiar, chauvinistic,
“There's three things I never loan out: my
wife, my toothbrush, and my car.” It’s funny
what you remember of people. Chief was
Filipino, short, muscular, with a round,
youthfully handsome face and a trim pencil
‘stash. Not razor thin, but the handsomest
moustache of that kind that I’ve ever seen.
He wasn’t in the warehouse too often.
I worked in the warehouse with R. K. Brown,
Gary Hanson, and Dwight David Baer,
whom we called D.D. No one called Brown
R.K. It was always Brown. He supervised
the warehouse. I remember the faces of all
the men more clearly than the woman
because I saw her least of all the people
I mentioned. One day O’Connor, on the
short side, and chubby to the point of being
overweight, commented that his paper work
(mental work) was more arduous than our
physical work. The office was long,
with a line of windows that looked out
at a lawn, whereas the only window
in the warehouse was square like an ‘8 x '11
sheet of paper, and centered in the door
to which Brown had the key. He kept a ring
of keys at his waist, wore a moustache
(not as trim as Chief’s), chewed gum,
and sang in a high alto, quietly, to himself.
The woman’s glasses were on a chain.
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