‘Hardscape Permanence’, ‘Senior Night in North Country’, & ‘Father, Herculean’
Photographer - Tobi Brun
Hardscape Permanence
Today you really could have just killed your boss,
could have let him feel your words of razor-fanged
truth slice at him, cut through the stitching of his thick,
unused work-jeans and scar the skin on his knee caps
so that every time he bent down for the rest of his life,
he would curse your name.
But you didn’t. You stayed hunched in the salt of the sun,
cooking like onions, secreting oils you didn’t know you had
while you listened to Carlos and his prayers of calm
as he muttered to you in a language you haven’t spoken since the tenth grade.
You thought of how the rolls of Carlos’ Spanish Rs reminded you of
the rolling hills of your youth, and how hatred for any unkind patròn
was one bubble in the grand boiling of time.
Carlos guided your calloused, tired arms
―your muscles soundlessly stuttering―
as blocks of cement tiles got laid into the dug up front lawn.
Small holy-stones to build the stairway to this suburban front door
on a home that looks like any other home in all of America.
But Carlos worked you marrowless with his faith in you―
his brown magnitude kissed with triumph
as every twenty pound stone got laid into the earth
with the respect of a fallen brother,
and how each rock was consecrated through the action of its placement,
and though you’d never believed in Him before,
you swore you felt Jesus there with you, as long as Carlos,
with the dark eyes of the universe, beckoned you onward.
“But onward to what?” You questioned as the boss cackled, unwet on the phone.
You see because of Carlos, as he placed another reliquary into the earth,
that it is permanence which you crawled towards in the heavy tongue of August,
sweating so fiercely your fingers left prints on the cement.
This stairway, in its small holy masses, through the worship of each patterned stone,
became the only thing you’ve created that could outlast you,
and though you’ve searched for decades for the perfect words to be remembered by,
it is through Carlos’s tireless hand, a soft prayer,
and a dug up front lawn in some American suburb
where you placed your eternity.
Senior Night in North Country
The cold parents wipe white powder snow from torn boots
like emperors might shed diamonds from their cloaks.
The old pair sulk into the poorly lit gymnasium,
and search for their pride and joy;
the boy they love
silently and fervently,
like suns silently warming
the young oak in the backyard.
They have put on their finest hunting shirts,
their most expensive coats;
it is their son’s senior night.
They watch him sling his wrestler’s singlet onto his chest,
a broad, muscled thing which the mother remembers
was once no bigger than her waitress notepad.
The father steps on a piece of wood
that has creaked since he wore a singlet
in the same gymnasium
thirty years prior. His eyes sparkle ruby red at the sound―
at the thought of his lone mother with a frumpy,
bent bouquet in a tired lap.
He points to a clear spot of benching and the two damply take their seats.
The empty flat circle―that wrestling mat, that empty eye―
which their son has obsessed over for years
lies vacant and open before them,
an all seeing iris peering past the old ceiling into
the ebony sky outside where only the full moon looks back.
The white haired coach coughs nervously into the microphone,
trumpeting his voice to a crowd who knows him like a second family,
and who knows this speech on love of toughness
like they know the taste of cold beers and warmth from woodfire stoves.
The coach says their family name, and the couple stands awkwardly with crowns of pride
that feel like anvils in this room of families whose names they’ve known since childhood.
Their still wet boots leave drops of crystal water on that open eye before them
as they bring a frozen set of garnet carnations to their son.
The boy releases an embarrassed smirk, and grows two microscopic inches
like a prince inheriting a title he knows he deserves.
They smile together for an awkward photo
and shuffle in royal unison to the side,
where their coronation ends and they become common folk once more.
The son holds flowers with unfamiliarity and,
not for the first time, the father cannot find the words to express―
“You were just a little acorn, once,” the mother saves him.
She cries and smiles in the way that hides
the yellow teeth she is scared to show the world,
and the father agrees solemnly and tells his son silently
through a wordless tapping of the shoulder
that in the endlessness of the universe,
in the ineffable, infallible, unknowability of
the grandeur of all things,
that this small town’s senior night so many miles from any city,
in the faceless heart of winter,
through bruising grunts and frantic wrestling,
is exactly where he was meant to be.
And the family looks at that open eye before them as it stares
infinitely upward to the gleaming, diamond of the moon.
Father, Herculean
Waiting for your father to move
feels like staring at the broken armed statue
of Hercules in The Met.
How at first glance, he is the creator,
the defender, the hero of the earth,
bound in infinity, stark naked and unafraid
of the sharp teeth of the world–the worlds,
dangling around him like the once hungry flames of
the dead cigarettes piled in the ash trays of
the scorching house.
But you wonder if that lion head wrapped around his skull
is not a crown made from a defeated beast
but a shawl of death marking the numbered days
of the strongest hero among us.
Hercules stands there armless,
limbless, tall and ancient,
yet feeble.
He postures humble, stoic strength,
like a white birch on the edge of collapse,
the rot so entangled within its core,
that its branches leap off in pining evacuation
and gather like empty beer cans in the dust of antiquity.
But maybe, you think, that old power is somewhere
in the dusty thing you look at slouched before you.
Maybe that old strength is still in those limbs that
used to move with the strength of the marble mountains
they were so long ago carved from.
But your living room isn’t The Met,
it’s too cold and smells like sweat and grease,
not poise and intellect,
and you can’t hear the many languages
of eager tourists viewing Greco-Roman works.
All you can hear is the tired sonorous snoring
of a man who isn’t formidable enough
to sit all the way up in the arm chair.
Peter Randazzo teaches history in upstate New York and runs the No Poet Peach blog on WordPress. He has a bachelor’s degree in Social Studies Education from SUNY New Paltz and a Master’s Degree in Curriculum Instruction from SUNY Empire. He has published in the anthologies of Eber & Wein, Hidden in Childhood, Penumbra, and has self-published "Dandelions & The Right Notes" on Amazon.
