‘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.

Burnt Offering

Photographer - Tobi Brun

Burnt Offering

The old marketplace, the center of the gathering, could be dated back to the glorious Romans so many years ago. Cauchon squirmed uncomfortably as he stood in his white robes outside of the church in Rouen. Standing there, he thought of how those ancient warriors, that red legion, would honor their pagan, heretic gods with burnt offerings. He wondered doubtfully,
with the silent weight of guilt like a tomb balanced on the tip of his pointed mitre hat, if he was not doing the same.

They brought her out, head shaven and in men’s clothing. This heretic fool. He had tried to save her from this, tried to bring her back from demonic damnation at that trial. But she was
insistent, persistent in delusion. She heard voices, she had said, as though the tongue of Satan flapped from between her lips. She stated it was the saints in her ears; Catherine and Margaret.
She claimed that God almighty, in France’s great time of need, would speak to this peasant farm girl.

What true God spoke to women? None. This was not Genesis nor the book of Luke, where God and his angels would send the golden voices of divinity to speak truths to humankind’s ears. This was France, four hundred years had passed since the First Holy Crusade. If anyone, God spoke to the Pope, but to filthy girls like her? No. It is just not so.

One or two of the armed English soldiers stifled a laugh as the pale young woman squeaked slightly in pain as they shoved her forward into the old market square. Only nineteen they believe, a beautiful girl, even with her hair gone and that gap between her teeth, she had done so much―too much―too quickly. From peasant to leader of all the armies of France, shining in armor underneath bloody banners at Orleans and Patay―Cauchon thought she was a half-witted girl who was lucky in leading some good fighting men forward. No hand of God, no voice of the Almighty blessing her ear. Yet, as she staggered forward bound in the malice of others, Cauchon thought that her bald head and her ragged men’s clothes shimmered with the same metallic glint of steel armor she had worn only a month ago.

Cauchon looked down at his white tunic and patted at the wrinkles on his chest. Yes, yes, his conscience was clear. No woman would hear the voice of God―she had to be lying, she was
a fool, and no God would support the French over the English and Cauchon’s own Burgundians. He had captured, tried this girl, and thus, God had to be on his side. Who was ending their story
bound and put to death? Not him―it was her― if that didn’t prove guilt enough, then what did? He thought of another being he had studied who had been bound before, but shook the example from his memory― he sniffed loudly, this was nothing like that. He looked down and spat. Some of the crowd looked up to him. He thought he could smell the burning scent of Roman offerings―the scent of frying pork skin riffled through his nostrils. He spat again. No. The drunk English men tied her to a tall stone column built long before anyone could remember. The soldiers started singing in English as they gathered wood in front of the murmuring crowd:

“Our King went forth to Normandy With grace and might of chivalry; There God worked marvelously for him, Wherefore England may call and cry out: Thanks be to God!”

The girl’s eyes pierced through the thundering silence which roared even under the drunkard song of the English. A mountainous stoicism bound to the unnerved frame of this pale, bald, gap-toothed girl. Cauchon could see her teeth from his position above the crowd. Was that a smile? Or was she wincing? He saw the whole universe in the gap of her teeth and he looked down again to spit.

He shook his head. A heretic deserves hell. God would say so, God had said so. From Revelations: “the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those
who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars—they will be consigned to the fiery lake of burning sulfur.” Had this girl not been cowardly and sexually immoral by dressing in men’s
clothing? Had she not been idolatrous, by pretending to hear voices? Of course. This was holy practice, Godly practice. The will of the Lord, the want of the Shepherd. Cauchon knew his responsibility, and he too had a flock to keep, to herd from danger and hell. The girl smelled coarsely of hell of wrongdoing, of vulgarity. He could smell it from all the way over here, her wrinkled face almost like a moon in the water of time. That scent―that burning pork again―again he thought of those red Romans and their burnt offerings.

His white robes ruffled in the light breeze as he heard a pile of wood clunk against the base of the column the girl was tied to. She remained motionless as the pile of wood grew around her feet―she was a fool who deserved this. He looked down to spit again but he saw at the knee of his glowing white gown, a smudge of mud. It must have splashed up from the mud of May in
Rouen’s streets. It was a brown and black pupil that sneered upwards, a smudge of filth. There was that pugilent smell again―and then the thought that came with it: what had she said,
through that gap between her teeth at her trial? What were those words she had said with the spite and skill of clerical expertise?:

His tail had tightened between his legs as she had gone on and on of the voices of Saints Catherine and Margaret and the love of God above. The jury of
clergymen had shaken their heads in unison, a forest of disapproving skulls. Cauchon was onto her; he knew in her heart was the heart of the false shepherd, the idol of darkness sewn tightly into the fabric of her soul. His patience had run out and so he had asked her, this peasant girl who knew not her letters nor anything of royal courts nor law, he had asked: “Do you know, in fact, that you
are in God’s grace?”

And the clergy at the trial squirmed in excitement, a law they had learned in their universities, in the instruction of logic on the will of God. Surely the girl who had sworn to have heard the female saints above in her ear knew she was in the grace of God. The question was a tricky one, a trap to show her as the dark idol he had known her to be. If she said yes, he’d call her a heretic―only God Himself can know if one is in God’s grace. If she said no, she’d be admitting that she was a false prophet, a liar mincing the words of saints for witchly powers. But the silence of the room felt hollow, like a rotten trunk in a forest. The many heads in their white gowns of purity pierced the girl in her mannish clothes as she stood pale as snow in the center of the room. Her hands were bound, her eyes trembling, her body as calm and quiet as mountains of southern France. Cauchon, himself, felt the roaring impatience of the ocean breaking upon Normandy’s shore, chewing at timelessness and silence with bereft, incessant motion.

“Answer the question;” he said with shark teeth, “Do you know, in fact, that you are in God’s grace?”

The girl exhaled as though the very tome of patience was being written in the breath winding out over her tongue, “If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me.” She said this slowly, her enunciation like the great royalty of old, the clarity of doctrine thundering through her quiet, yet powerful words. The forest of clergy rocked in the wind of her deposition, and Cauchon splashed in the suddenly calm waters of her profundity, his shark teeth dulled in her iron stoicism.

He had had her jailed anyway. Looked the other way as Englishmen had their way with her. Punished her when she had stripped herself from her dress and put men’s clothes back on. She was guilty, in every action, she was a heretic at best, at worse, a witch. The scripture was very clear. Fire. Fire. Fire at the stake. He realized now, the memory flowing through him, that that had been the moment when he first smelled it: the burnt offering smell, that stench of roasting pig fat broiling on a spicket. That flashing visage of red Romans uttering some mantra to a pantheon of dead heathen gods. That was the first time, and he smelled it again now as the torch of the sacrifice―no, breathe,

Cauchon―the torch of the sacrament of God was being lowered down around her feet. He had apparently missed the announcement of her wrongdoings, her public sentencing, and he refocused now as the orange torch spread the flames which began to lick around her ankles. Her mouth finally found its anxiety, its concern, its devine doubt as the kissings of flame found her bare skin and the small hairs populating her legs began to scorch black. Small shrieks were splattered out from that gap between her front teeth, and though Cauchon was certain he saw a flash of summer sunshine emanate from between them, her words became partnered with steaming tears as she squirmed and wriggled against the column holding her firmly to her sacreligious punishment.

She moved like the worm she was as she shouted out the name of the lord, “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” as the flames turned her bald white skin pink and as pink began to ebb into black. The smell was putrid, it was overwhelming. Cauchon looked away from the sacrif―sacrament and back into the black iris-stain on his robes. He felt his smile fade, like it was yanked downward and away from him. He closed his eyes but the Romans shouted their mantra at him beneath his eyelids.The thunder of drumming banged along as he heard her high whimpers and the hushed gasps of a hungry crowd.

The fire was short yet cruel and the screechings of the witch passed like the May breeze. The crowd shuddered at the squealing of this girl, once the proud knight of the people, the banner of the crown of France. The vigorous body slumped into crooked black cruelty, a charred remain bent in holy prayer folds, like a large pair of prayerful hands clasped black from the ash of holy incense.

The smoke was worse than the flame. Cauchon thought so as he stared at the smoldering pile spit its black color into the blue void of the sky. He thought he saw faces in the smoke.

Female saints? A gap-toothed woman? Eternity was above, yet also, eternity drooled below in the pits of hell. That black smoke, as he walked over to the pyre through the crowd leaving the site, past the drunken English soldiers, seemed to smolder so quickly into the heavens. He looked at the charred body, the white skull beginning to glimpse through the falling ash of burnt flesh. The Romans in his brain were shouting now, their mantra of polytheism berating like a drum on the inside of his skull. He saw the white set of teeth peer through the ashen black, smoke whispering in whisps from a jaw still unclenched from the world’s cruelty.

He fell, knees first, into the ash. His white robes soaking in the soot. He stared at that small gap between the ruin of her skull. He smelled the burnt flesh of pig skin. He heard the hammering of drums, he felt a strong current anchoring him downward beneath the stonework. His ashen knees began to bleed and blister upon the hot cobblestone.

Two clergymen saw Cauchon’s fall and they ambled over to him. Try as they might, they struggled to lift him from his knelt position, a position almost as in prayer, so close to the still hot ash and coals of the public execution. He started shouting, hardly words at first, and then his words fell to a constant incoherent mumbling as yet more clergymen pulled Cauchon from his troubled kneel. They brought him to the infirmary. His mumbling never ceased.

He was blanketed and someone lit a fire in his hot room to sweat out the demons from his body. It was probable that devils had made him sick in the first place, they suggested, being in such close approximation to the witch’s death.

Cauchon’s eyes stared at the little fire in his little room, his eyes unsleeping, unwavering from the coals replenished and replenished by concerned clergymen of Burgundy. But as they cleaned his sheets and changed him, as they fetched him french water and bled him from disease, they heard him ask a quiet question to himself, over and over as the fire continued to flicker. It was a question none of them answered nor interrupted, nor wrote down. One they ignored, for though they would not say, they felt it too:

“Am I in God’s Grace?”

He would shiver with each inquisition as the words rolled from his tongue. All the while, his eyes watched the fire and his nostrils smelled the burnt flesh of burnt offerings to pagan gods as he laid in his shadowed monk cell sweating through his sheets.

Peter Randazzo has a bachelor’s degree in Social Studies Education from SUNY New Paltz and a Master’s Degree in Curriculum Instruction with a focus in Literacy from SUNY Empire. He teaches history in upstate New York, is a poet with Dead Man’s Press, runs the Clever Name Collective writer’s group in Albany, and runs the No Poet blog on WordPress. He has published in the anthologies of Eber & Wein, Hidden in Childhood, Penumbra, and has self-published "Dandelions & The Right Notes" on Amazon.