43 Violence poems

When the mule balked, he hit him sometimes with the flat of a hand upside the head; more often the stick he carried did its angry trick. The mule’s job was to power the press, iron on iron that wrung the sugar out of cane, circling under the coarse beam attached to his shoulders and neck. That mule of my childhood was black, remained blackly obedient as round and round he made himself the splintered hand of a clock, the groan and squeak of machinery chewing the reedy stalks to pulp, each second delivering another sweet thin drop into the black pot at the center. He hit him with a rag, old headrag, but the animal winced only with the thrash of a cane stalk itself—he squinted under the rule of that bamboo. The sun was another caning on his black-hot flesh. He was slow as the blackstrap syrup the boiled sugar made, so true to the circle he dragged we hardly saw him. We loved the rustling house of green cane, blind in that field of tropical grasses whose white plumes announced the long season’s wait. We yearned for the six-foot stem, the eventual six pieces the machete sliced at the joints, then the woody exterior peeled back lengthwise with a blade. It was a black hand we waited for, his job to lay bare the grainy fiber we chewed. That juice on our tongues was his sweetness at work. Chester was his name, he kept the mule.

A stick, pared clean—no, a silver-topped bamboo-with-dagger, class doubling as club, the advantage of gravity lifted high overcoming the disadvantage of poking ahead. He demurs. Weakness either way. A man should crush opponents with a word. Naive, I muse, at your age. A cane replaces the sole’s sensors, bolsters them. Balance is a matter for the unbalanced, he says, all nuance, accusing me, Lear-lover, of too much. The earth is now close, I tell him. A sharp look. I’ll walk, he says, without.

The guys who drank quarts of Busch last night here by the backstop of this baseball diamond had names given them by their mothers and fathers— “Jack” and “Kenny” let us say. Jack might be a skinny guy in a black fake-leather jacket, he’s twenty-five, his gray pants are too loose on his hips, his jaws always have these little black extra hairs, his mother won’t talk to him on the phone, she lives on french fries and ketchup, he hasn’t been able to send her any cash in the last two years, ever since he lost his job unloading produce trucks at Pathmark; Jack’s father disappeared when he was ten. “No big deal,” Jack says, “he was a bastard anyway, he used to flatten beer cans on the top of my head.” Kenny offers a laugh-noise. He’s heard all that before. Kenny is forty-eight, a flabby man with reddened skin, he is employed at the Italian Market selling fish just four hours a day but his shirts hold the smell; his female companion Deena left him a note last month: “You owe me $12 chocolate $31 wine $55 cable TV plus donuts—I have had it—taking lamp and mirror they are mine.” Kenny hasn’t seen her since. He hangs with Jack because Jack talks loud as if the world of cops and people with full-time jobs could be kept at bay by talking, talking loud . . . (I’m talking gently and imaginatively here as if the world of bums and jerks could be kept far off—) Jack and Kenny. (Or two other guys dark to me with wounds oozing in Philadelphia ways less ready to narrate.) Last night at midnight they got cheesesteaks at Casseloni’s and bought four quarts at the Fireside Tavern and wandered into this park. After one quart of Busch Jack said he was Lenny Dykstra and found a stick for his bat. “Pitch to me asshole” he said so Kenny went to the mound and pitched his bottle for want of anything better and Jack swung in the dark and missed; Kenny’s bottle smashed on home plate and Jack heard in the sound the absurdity of all his desiring since seventh grade, absurdity of a skinny guy who blew everything since seventh when he hit home runs and chased Joan Rundle around the gym so Jack took his own empty bottle and smashed it down amid the brown shards of Kenny’s bottle. Then they leaned on the backstop to drink the other two quarts and they both grew glum and silent and when they smashed these bottles it was like what else would they do? Next morning Nick and I come to the park with a rubber ball and a miniature bat. Nick is not quite three but he knows the names of all the Phillies starters and he knows the area around home plate is not supposed to be covered with jagged pieces of brown glass. Like a good dad I warn him not to touch it and we decide to establish a new home plate closer to the mound (there’s no trash can handy). “Who put that glass there?” Nick wants to know and to make a long story short I say “Bad People.” Nick says “Bad? How come?”