Five Poems by Peter Mladinic

 

Going Forward 

 

The Ericksons didn’t get the name Sheba 

from the Bible. Lutherans, from Minnesota,  

at least Edith was. Not that Lutherans  

don’t read the Bible. Maybe Sheba  

came from Come Back, Little Sheba. 

Theirs, a black and white Boston terrier,  

ran the length of chain link between their  

yard and ours. I remember Edith, blonde,  

stout in a flowered apron at a birdbath.  

Bill, knuckles gnarled from arthritis, 

behind a push mower. A sun-visor,  

khaki shirt and slacks. He worked in lumber.  

Nancy, obese at ten, splashed in a rubber  

pool. In her future, a teachers college  

in Kansas, marriage to a mail carrier  

who already had two children. Nancy, 

Bill and Edith’s only child. They climbed  

into a Continental. Bill drove to a restaurant  

with knotty pine walls. This morning  

I open a gate, go in.  Sheba’s frantically  

running up and down, going forward.

 

 

Raleigh Coupons  

 

A smoker of Raleigh straights, Adele saved  

her coupons, and got a silver toaster.  

Quiet by nature, she said little to the smoke  

rising to the ceiling, less to Sir Walter  

on her pack. Her parents were from Germany.  

Her mother gutted fish on a breezeway.  

Her father, a black fedora; a full, trim, white  

moustache; a silver pocket watch kept  

to himself. Her husband’s humped back  

was shadowy. He owned an auto upholstery  

shop. Their son Frank and I culled Dude  

and Nugget girlie fantasies from fishbone  

patterns in his coveralls. In their finished  

basement of knotty pine I asked Frank  

who he thought was prettier, Marilyn Monroe  

or his mother.  He looked at me really  

seriously. I heard the clump of chain on wood;  

the big, mangey, black dog Prince’s platform  

in their backyard. I saw my reflection  

in Adele’s toaster. Her skin like wrinkled  

parchment, black hair covered her ears  

but didn’t come to her shoulders. Frank’s  

was darker. Her mother’s mouse-brown hair  

in a bun in oak shade told me nicely  

not to walk on my toes. Her father drove 

a black coupe. On their breezeway he stood  

at the top of stairs, boasted Frank’s all A’s  

and laughed at my report card.  He barely  

spoke English. His wife could speak it a bit  

better. I liked watching her hands working  

a knife in Cold War America. Three of Frank’s  

cousins visited from Germany. The eldest  

walked us home from our first day at school.

  

 

Pitchers 

 

You’re too young to remember the Yankees’ 

Ryne Duren? The pinstripes, the dark blue 

cap, the face blond and wide, the rimless  

glasses. He was blind and fast, practically  

blind. On the mound the wind up, delivery. 

Even the TV viewers’ Schlitz commercials  

between innings were afraid of him, Ryne, 

in his grave with impresarios of stillness: 

starters Ford, Span, Burdette, reliever Labine. 

 

Denny McClain of the prison sentence won 

thirty games, the last to do so, I believe, 

in America. We teach kids they can be  

what they want to be. The aforementioned   

from their silence cry, Poets dead and gone! 

In that great stadium in the sky Duren is  

William Faulkner, who left poetry’s 

marble fawn for The Sound and the Fury. 

Ford is Richard Wilbur; Span, Tony Hecht; 

 

Labine, Miss Bishop.  If pitchers were poets, 

McClain, the one still living would be Louise  

Bogan, the woman in Roethe’s “I Knew  

a Woman.” While we’re at it, let’s throw in 

knuckleballer Hoyt Wilhelm, baffling batters 

from the mound in that stadium in the sky, 

He’d be the great E. A. Robinson,  

character creator, rhymer, classics lover,  

and, like the Yanks’ Arroyo, a reliable closer.

 

 

The Black Path 

 

Stephanie Evans lived in Tyler, Texas 

but somehow found her way  

into my classroom that was like a cellar  

 

corner.  Even with its high  

rectangular windows and high ceiling  

it seemed dark. Her face seemed like a face  

 

out of a Renoir painting: soft eyes, dimpled  

chin, light complexion, a late Victorian face  

in that corner of southeast New Mexico 

 

I knew as our room.  

I’m not sure if she was in class the day  

I lost my temper (some days I thought,  

 

there are twenty of you, only one of me)  

and dismissed class thirty minutes early.  

I walked out of the building into a sunny late  

 

morning and encountered Mitchell Pierce,  

my dean, surprised to see him  

on that part of the campus. I felt compelled  

 

to tell him I let the class out early, and why.  

He said little, only indicated he understood,  

then walked on toward the building I’d left.  

 

It wasn’t long after that  

that he became the college’s president.  

A job he worked hard at, and for which  

 

he was paid well for the next twenty years.  

He could have had a dream retirement,  

but shortly after he retired he fell ill.   

 

He couldn’t stay retired. For a while he  

served as interim president, then stayed on  

in an advisory capacity. I heard that  

 

sometimes he’d be walking on campus  

and he’d fall. He could never quite move on,  

let go of the job he was so dedicated to.  

 

But even if he’d travelled to Tahiti, the illness  

would have been inside him, taking over.   

He could have gone anywhere,  

 

but he was needed at the college, happy  

at the college. That day I told him I “lost it”  

I didn’t have to.  As busy as he was,  

 

he must have had a lot on his mind.  

Students were all around. He saw me,  

I saw him. I could have just nodded hello  

 

and kept walking across campus,  

toward my office. That was one of the rare  

instances I dismissed class early  

 

due to my being upset. I can’t remember  

what upset me or if Stephanie was there,  

at desk, thinking lesser of me than when  

 

class began. (There are twenty of you,  

more often twenty-five, one of me.)  

The common denominator of any class.  

 

Stephanie looked like a girl out of the horse   

and carriage era.  Mitch wore a suit and tie,  

most often a red tie.

  

 

The Skyliners 

 

Everybody must have loved somebody 

from Pittsburgh at some time 

in their lives. I have. It wasn’t romantic. 

It happened slowly from being with a person  

five days a week for the good part of a year,  

1966-67, in a warehouse where we kept 

capacitors with little wires in bins,  

and generators with globes on shelves,  

Electronic parts, on a naval base in Cutler, 

Maine. The person I worked for, and loved 

came from Pittsburgh’s The Hill. His hair  

a widow’s peak, he twirled a toothpick,  

he sang softly in a high-pitched voice.  

He was Black, with copper skin, a navy lifer. 

 

Each Monday and Thursday, very early in 

the morning, I wheel my Waste Management  

barrel from my yard out to the back alley 

behind my cinderblock fence. Recently  

out there, and it was all dark, I looked up 

at the sky just starting to get light. I’d like  

to think it was shifting clouds, but honestly  

I can’t remember. I glanced at the sky  

and thought of The Skyliners, a vocal group 

from Pittsburgh whose records charted in  

the early 1960s. Jimmy Beaumont their lead 

is gone, so is Janet Vogel, the one female  

in the group. I then thought of R. K. Brown. 

If alive, he’s well up in years today. 

 

Back inside, a mouse, in fluorescent light,  

sprinted across the floor, from fridge  

to automatic washer. I wondered if, late 

at night, it goes beyond the kitchen. Mice,  

I’ve heard, live in walls. This one looked well fed. 

I sat in the living room, thinking The Skyliners 

were really good; when their songs charted 

I didn’t realize just how good. 

Just like with Brown, I was too busy rubbing  

shoulders with him, to realize what I felt  

was love. If you really love someone, do you  

ever stop loving them? That mouse is alive. 

Jimmy and Janet are gone. But I can hear 

them, and Brown, as clearly as I see his face.

Peter Mladinic's most recent book of poems Maiden Rock, is available from UnCollected Press. An animal rights advocate, he lives in Hobbs, New Mexico, United States.