At dawn,
a gray ceiling breaks
over the Lake Ontario shore
and shows a myriad of clouds,
white as swans,
which part and play themselves out
to display blue
as it becomes blue and bluer still,
while below, water ripples
just beneath
the furled feet of surface skimming birds.
The ripples rise –
water rises high enough to fall
then splash
and bless
the sanctuary of the shore.
(The title is Latin for “I will go to the altar of god.”)
Use of Verse
While young, I made a poem
and found a way to roam
the mind’s furrows and folds,
to ride neurons, and slide
along synapses as if they were
icy hillside sidewalks in a little
river city beside a great lake,
and look again where yesterday
was work play sleep, while
tomorrow looms six feet deep.
Oswego Suite
I. Overture, with Locomotive
Up the street from my boyhood home
is the western portal of a Delaware, Lackawanna
and Western Railroad tunnel –
One of the shortest on record,
it ends at the west bank of the Oswego River,
four blocks away.
For a six year old boy, that is the measure
of a railroad tunnel, and to trespass it alone,
the measure of daring –
And the triumph of wonder over wisdom.
Just as its maw exerts force in daylight, at night,
the rhythm track of my green mind is laid:
Clickety clack clickety clack clickety clack
clickety clack clickety clack clickety clack clickety
clack clickety clack clickety clack clickety
The sound of Pennsylvania mountains,
in chunks, now in New York, to become
steam, then power for our Philco sets,
Which display, in crystal clarity, Roy Cohn
as he counsels Joe McCarthy, how to deepen
the trench that alienates Americans.
II. Sustenance of Memory
A luminous blackness is what I recall entering
before dawn the autumn I was twelve to do my paper route,
in a grid of streets with European and Haudenosaunee names.
From home on Montcalm Street overlooking Lake Ontario,
I zigzagged along streets named
Van Buren,
Cayuga,
Schuyler,
and Seneca
until I arrived at the alley alongside the Oswego River,
where we paperboys rolled the Syracuse Post-Standard
into porch-seeking missiles.
Now, a bleak time suck is what I imagine when I consider
googling “news fall 1962,” to add a veneer of verisimilitude
over my boyhood memory, as if our missiles needed warheads.
But memory doesn’t need facts, only honesty –
we’ll be sustained by that, plus a mouthful of names.
III. Buoys and Gales
Down the street from my teenage home
is Lake Ontario; my bedroom window
frames the harbor: breakwall, buoys, and lighthouse.
Beacons break the dark with random red pulses
and a broad beam of light sweeps the water –
north east south west, around and around and around.
Once in a blue moon the beacons pulse at once,
as if to acknowledge your rapt attention.
Stormy weather is the best time to gaze –
when the foghorn sounds, it says you’re doomed
to loneliness and sorrow, if not in so many words.
We swam there and used a buoy near the breakwall
like a giant toy – we clambered aboard, tried to topple it, as if
we Oswego boys could do what Lake Ontario gales never did.
Childhood escaped, with breadcrumbs
Go outdoors and play says my father around eight on Saturday mornings as he heads to work in the middle of the 1950s, when the brainchild of Philo Farnsworth and company was yet creeping, it delighted me to gallup into adventureland,
My stint at the Idiot Box enough for an episode or two of Hopalong Cassidy, following ten, fifteen minutes of test pattern mesmerization, accompanied by In The Hall of the Mountain King*, the original earworm, which teased me and tickled me and nearly blew
My Peter Pan mind fifty years later when I witnessed a most improbable mashup: Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, together with Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, who play both the European
Classical version of Edvard Greig’s Peer Gynt Suite and its adaptation for jazz band by Duke Ellington, alternating movements back and forth the score of players led by Marsalis seated in the midst of the four score musicians under Ozawa’s invisible baton
At Tanglewood, on Mohican land in Massachusetts, two hundred miles from my boyhood home sited five blocks from the mouth of the river that was Main Street to Onondaga Fire-keepers twenty five miles upstream of Lake Ontario.
Ten years before shooing me outdoors, my father was busy shooting his way toward Hitler, along with the best of his generation of Americans, and her allies, such as New Zealand, home of the politician who sneered “OK Boomer.”
Now, kids, what does your Saturday look like?
*”In the Hall of the Mountain King” is a piece of orchestral music composed by Edvard Grieg in 1875 as incidental music for the sixth scene of act 2 in Henrik Ibsen’s 1867 play Peer Gynt. It was originally part of Opus 23 but was later extracted as the final piece of Peer Gynt, Suite No. 1, Op. 46. (Source: Wikipedia.)
Dave Read