La Dolce Vita (poem)

He arrived here not from Italia, for in 1920
    a man's country was still la famiglia,
And affairs of state were conducted in the green
    vineyards surrounding a man's village,
Where the only officialdom was one's compare
    e commare, and commerce was solely weighed
In the coin of familial interest:  il papa
Would consult his kin, and then rule ex cathedra.

No, he arrived not from Italia but from Benevento,
    a small wine-growing village perched high
On the slopes of the wind-swept and scraggy Dolomites
    where his family had grown olives and bambinos
In equal profusion for centuries, slowly despoiling
    the land which had once nurtured; at age nine
He boarded a boat bound for Ellis Island, the first
Of the many ambassadors his family would send.

He joined his many fellow contadinos
    in the Little Italy of Boston's North End,
And soon was laying tracks for the Boston & Maine;
    he prospered, built himself a neat white home
In the suburbs, took a young immigrant la donna
    to be his wife and created his own famiglia
Of eleven children, the seventh being il primo figlio.
He began to call himself Frank, not Fortunato,

And started pronouncing his surname as an American,
    had running water and electricity, used his phone,
And even learned to drive the second-hand Olds
    he bought from someone who had come from the Capua
Area, too--but when I met him when he was old
    and retired, I would watch him stand out back
Where his garden grew, and I would watch him caress
His plum tomatoes with an almost appalling tenderness.

"Pomodori," he softly chanted, weighing the heft
    of that ancient word against this alien world
For whose tongue he no longer had any use; and lifting
    a rubbed red radish to his sly smiling mouth,
He would  whisper "ravanelli" to himself, soft
    and low, savoring the radish-sharp retort
Of that first bite--and in that child's moment unfurled
All my ageless time, and endless echoes first heard.

Scaling the Ramparts (poem)

 --USAFA, 1970

                                       I

Poised half the way up the Rockies' east front range,

   we three toiled in a crowd of blue

suits, unmilitant militants in a melange

of would-be scholarly soldiers:  we trained our shoes

   to be  mirrors of our stoical face,

schooled our minds in how to bulletproof

our young bodies, measured our swift days in pacing

    punishments on a latticed terrazo,

and gave infinite care to out jackboot lacings.

Early to bed, early we rose to this martial piazza

   and marched, asleep, to a pre-dawn breakfast,

though praying first to a young warrior's gods;

and then off to class where benignant achitects

   of inhuman designs taught us the methods

of human erasure, pure, chaste, and delectable.

Late afternoons, our football became a bullet

   of innocent intent, a guided missile

for the fraternal strife of playing cadets.

Remote, in that high air, what could we tell

to those mountains about a distant shrapnel?

What could we know of the blooded ineffable?

                                     

                                      II

Three young, unthinking reeds--

fragile Swan, sinuous swimmer

in discontent; dumb Wise

who'd mindless aspire without intent;

and Tony Zap, pure mafioso

of his burnt-out, desirous bent--

frozen in the green of their spring year

find vision suddenly sprung upward,

up the ooming, overarching

Rampart Range and find as sudden

hearts beating up that steep

slope, the vertiginous slope climbing

eastward and up towards the pale sun,

and vine-like up they begin to creep.

                                       III

And so pointed our plod up that sliding slide of peak,

placed each foot, feeling grave fetters receding,

noted tough pines thinning, our streterous talk

blown up the balding slope, buoyant in rarified blue

of heaving ascent, and hefted to  communal hearts

onto granite crag, at last, and beheld the midget grace

of a world grown small below.

                                       IV

stone face mountain high--

we blow the reefer-mad spring

out over endless plains     

                                        V

      And then down

screeing. skiing down the slope

  from rock to branch

                  to rock and rock

      and rock, hairless

                  heads streaming back

         and up, pulsating         

brains

                            grinning

   at speed

                        and dopplering trees

only to come to rest

     at the still

                              point

where a contoured green

spawns the rectangular stone terrazo.

                                       VI

Down, down, we came from the crown of the granite tor,

remembering only the distancing green arc of plain

fading at dark--that Monday, we played at that war

once more, stepping through that and each following day

in  their dutiful succession; below, mendicant whores

sold everyday wares and politicos weighed and delayed.

   Each morning, the blue geometer of our faceless crowd

   spoke as one, and resounded over the muffling clouds.

                                       VII

Sundays, sirens wailed

somewhere else--under the sun-drench

of stained glass, we sat

quiet and cool, cowering

in the holy guise

of a religious innocence.