John Barrale

Old Wool

My grandmother’s shawl was made from old wool.
When I was small, I thought it was magic,
a black bird that perched on her shoulder,
could predict the weather
and tell her the day’s secrets
as she poured morning milk and coffee
into our small, brown cups.
Then, knowing sun or rain,
my grandmother would say yes or no,
ruling on what we wore.
I remember her best that way.

The shawl was powerful. Mystic,
known and feared by the neighborhood children.
To them, it was a dreaded bird with the evil eye.
An uccello di malagurio it was called in whispers.
She, though, wore her shawl like a mantle of honor.
I punched my best friend Charlie hard
when he made fun of it.

The shawl had come with my grandmother from Sicily.
Both she and it, ancient and inseparable,
arriving after my grandfather,
like a storybook king, had died.
The once young and beautiful Concetta
now found herself a Strega Nonna,
a goddess of birds brought to earth,
betrayed by time, suddenly
hawk nosed and a crone.
She was carried off by my father’s
conquering legions.

Dazed, older than stone
and a prisoner of her old age,
she came to America, he winning,
and was dragged behind my father’s triumph.
Made to stand silent and stoic, a statue
in front of Caesar’s senate,
her sole purpose, it would seem,
to scare the neighbor’s boys,
who would jump
when walking past her if she spoke.

I don’t know where the shawl is now, or even if it still exists.
It lay for years in my mother’s dresser drawer,
its edges  folded in on itself
next to a pair of fur trimmed gloves.
When my mother died, the shawl was left to a spinster cousin,
the daughter of a luckless aunt, who had died before my grandmother.
I wonder if sad Maria ever wears it, or understands its weather,
or touches it to feel the places where the lambs met the night.

*

In Whispers

I want to meet my death
in a storm from the north
that stops in my yard
and wakes the neighbors,
their windows rolling up
in lights like new moons.

I want the real moon to be drunk,
on a deck in the rolling gray clouds,
a sailor in a boat about to be sunk
in the great wave of the storm.

I want the land and water to mix,
the oaks in the yard to scuttle their branches
and crabs to fly across the roof,
while my cats cry,
and the fox in the field
huddles close to her cubs.

I will howl.

But when the moment comes
and I die,
I want the wind to calm down
and be barely a sound.
Let my last breath be a mouse
its feet quiet and tiny in the barn’s corn.

In whispers, let me slip in.

*

Brooklyn 1963

Later he would remember and dream about his childhood.
His memories becoming a strange tale set somewhere else,
far off and distant like a great gray whale
that only now and then breaks the surface.
He spent his days reading,
fogged in thoughts half formed
in new words that spoke themselves
as he, sounded their meanings through pursed lips.
Life discovered in books.
His choice of expeditions guided
by the stern gaze of Clipper ship captains,
whose portraits dominated the cluttered sea of walls
and bookshelves in the school library,
its navy one thousand fifty volumes strong,
the collected remnants of a once vast fleet,
an 1890’s gift from some long-gone-to dust founding father,
the bindings and pages of the books dog-eared and ragged,
their sails savaged in many a hearty read,
now good only for young hands to pull up,
against imagination’s strong winds.

Time back then was a constellation,
a giant turtle in a night of shapes,
immense in its silence,
its great shell moved and covered the rooftops.
Slow, it flattened the hard line of the row houses,
bending, pressing them like stalks.
Methodical it fed
and chipped away at the buildings’ plaster walls,
the black and white hallway tiles,
cracked bathtubs, ripped linoleum,
and harsh, dry, old-wood floors.

But time was also the great lover,
who like Spring would return in courtship with flowers,
to call on the old streets and fill them
with robust new, young lovers:
Bohemians and artists who would, surprisingly,
find the rundown faces of the buildings new,
like those of actors from a past era discovered again,
and joyfully acclaimed
as camp and old,
but quite charming.

But to me, at fourteen, the neighborhood seemed just poor.
Its worn stoops and crumbling stone walks,
and old look-alike, drab, clapboard porches,
like a strange species of plant that grows too close together
and in bright light looks almost funny,
like blind men dancing
with arms stretched out to the sun.
But that same view, on a rainy day,
had a green lushness, almost the color blue,
calling up a deep sadness like the sea.
But, you never knew
whether the sea or the land was locked,
both being equal, ancient,
kept in their tombs by the spells of the moss
that clung to the slabs of the shore’s sea walls.

If these places had religion, it would be of broken bread
and Communion made with unkind loaves,
The Host, sickly dough, a weak bread of angels
at half strength, made for orphans and widows,
its sacrament poverty, final and binding.
There was no hope of Resurrection in these dark places,
just a sitting down at charity’s table,
the dishes set in sad dining halls,
the knives and forks cunning in their unspoken intent,
small and sharp-edged, ferret faced,
like the souvenir medallions that are stamped
with the faces of Saints.
We sat at these tables, our hands red raw,
scrubbed clean in steel sinks,
using cheap white bars of soap,
like rubbing salt into the soul,
wounds that would forever sting.

But there was hope.
Across the big bay, today as then,
hidden by Staten Island and the Narrows,
the great Lady stood on her concrete pedestal,
the rustling of her giant metal skirts
a noise in the mind like jazz,
music, made up, taken, from a thousand gifted shores,
that promised life and much more.
She was our silent genie,
offering new worlds from wishes,
her lamp and light from other places.
other selves, deep within us.

Her center, now as then,
was cold, hollow,
her face magnificent, serene.
Now as then, I see myself
as I climb her stairs,
and look out over her crown
and feel the fresh winds that come round
from way out past the breakers,
and that carry over the faint electric din
of Coney Island roller coasters.
Her smile, now as then, is magic,
gunmetal bright, shining,
the sister of steel piers
and Wonder Wheels.

Yes
and yes -
time comes around again
this way in a million years.

*

Coney Island By the Beach

Coney Island was the sea smell
on the subway ride home,
and the sand
in the bottom of your red pail.

And how on Saturdays in 1956,
the summer was always open,
and your mother
never wanted to go home
until after the fireworks,
and you slept
with your head on her lap.

And you remember your crazy Uncle
with the curly black goatee,
saying that the rides were the new Rome,
and that the Pope’s nose
was what hot dogs were made of,
and how he let you drink coffee
from the big steel thermos’ plastic cup,
and you were disappointed
because it tasted bitter.

But most of all,
I remember you as my father
and me as your son,
the way we walked together,
the sweet sails you opened
your stories like boats and wind,
in the good asphalt summer smell
of the street,

And I remember how good her hands were,
before Mom went ape,
and tried to hang herself,
clumsy, fumbling,
messing up the knot on the noose
that she then wore in shame,
for the next twenty years,
and how nobody was kind,
and how nobody forgave her.

*

For the Covered Women

I weep for sunflowers, that turn to the sun,

for the faces in the shadows
of caftans and burqas,

for the years that sleep under shawls,

for songs heard from behind walls,

for the nun’s shorn hair,
for her rounded shoulders,

for the bitter sweetness of her summer,

for the autumn and winters
of her back,

for the black and brown
of her habit,

I weep for those trapped,
for the stillborn,
for God’s design in this,

I weep for the mannequins and their makers,
for their markets and stalls,
for the logic, that takes the place
of magic and prayers,

I weep for dreams,
the millions held hostage,
blindfolded on the balcony,

I weep for God.

*

Clown in the Tenth Month

I was raised on the richness of carnivals.
midgets were my mentors,
bearded ladies were my queens.

I knew the crazy clowns,
and wore the fortuneteller’s pointed hat,

I was wed to summer,
and carried her tent on my back,

I feasted on penny candy and spring corn,
touched her clouds, on Ferris Wheels,

and in the rain,
smelled the tar and paint,
of wet circus wood.

I rode the ups and downs of roller coasters.

was loved,
my high and low cursed.

I stood,
drunk.

Oh, but how I paid,
new bright paint fades,
the clappers on bells break.
Wooden horses chase ghosts.
The ride stops.

October is the month
that breaks my heart.