Four Poems by Peter Mladinic

 

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.