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Going Home
Across from the Babe Ruth Field—
where Eddie Zappie pitched three perfect games
and could’ve made it,
if not for booze and Stacy Watson—
I kick the dust in the parking lot
at the old steel mill
where both my grandfathers did time,
watch the sun through broken
windows, the bricks and rust, ten years
since anyone worked here.
Downtown it’s just as quiet,
a few old men on benches and kids
on bikes racing red lights.
All the stores went in ’75,
now there’s a Wal-Mart out by the Thruway.
On Center Street it’s the same fat girl
behind the counter at the convenient store,
the same empty box cars
on the Third Street overpass and at Sara’s Tavern,
the same faces drink the once local draft,
day after day, like the old women
who chant novenas and lust
after the priests at St. Mary’s.
I can hardly imagine what Dunkirk was like
when my mother was young, let alone
in 1851, when the first train arrived with President Fillmore
and Daniel Webster onboard.
There are people here who talk of leaving,
but only go as far as Bruce’s Corner Store,
or the Greek diner at the dock.
Maybe it’s the view of the hills to the south,
or the three smoke stacks
of the electric plant at sunset, that keep us here,
or maybe it’s the sound of my own voice,
reciting the streets named for birds and fish
as if they were the names of saints.
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Tokyo And The Rio Grande
I was not yet twenty-six that January
I drove cross country
with two women, one of whom
I was foolishly in love with—for she
was in love with a herbologist from LA—
and the other one, who chewed bubble gum and talked
about nothing but Brad Pi and Scientology—
we picked up at a diner
outside Mobile, and though I’d been to Ireland
and Bermuda, it was my first time
west of Ohio.
On Interstate 40, somewhere between Bluewater
and Thoreau, my head buried
in the pages of a road atlas, my fingers
following our course, I marked off
cities and towns we passed
and remembered how, as a child
I’d sit for hours, gazing at maps, transfixed
by longitudes and latitudes, infatuated
by topographies, maps of rainfall
distribution, ocean currents,
vegetation and mineral maps,
maps that show the relative motion
of tectonic plates, changes
in sovereignty, military advances
and retreats. How I was smote
with historical maps, grew dizzy
over political and population maps,
maps that measured the depths of oceans,
lengths of rivers, world maps, regional maps and city maps.
All these maps filled me with a longing for some place
Other, like the stories my Uncle Joe told,
of his days in Buffalo, Boston and New York,
wandering streets, working in a garment factory, selling
his blood for wine and being rejected
by the Nation of Islam because he was white—
Each time I opened an atlas
those wondrous melodies and rhythms
played in my ears, places ten years
after that first cross-country trip
I still have yet to see:
Zanzibar, Marrakesh, Calabria
and Wolverhampton, Argentina,
Pakistan, Tokyo
and the Rio Grande.
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Copyrights @ Jason Irwin
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Get Out
for Ed
The first light of morning fills the spaces
between tree branches and houses
along the avenue.
You scrape frost from the windshield
of a rented truck, blow
into your numb hands and watch
your breath escape, the way you plan to escape—
the way your father did
all those summertimes ago—
just get the hell out
with nothing to guide you,
save an overwhelming desire
you find hard to describe, that
uncertainty that grows down deep in men,
makes them question
the simple comforts and securities they’ve been taught
to be thankful for.
One thing you do know:
you won’t grow old and die
in this town, with that desire still burning
your lips, when they lower you in the ground.
You won’t work your life away
without taking that “talked about” chance.
Inside the truck you crank the radio,
light your last cigarette, inhale
and head south.
On the highway it all seems perfect,
the future spread out before you
like the most beautiful woman in the world.
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Nothing I Thought I Knew
Monday I was the last seat
in the back row, in Mrs. Miller’s
fourth grade—next to Joe Larivy,
who picked his nose through Spelling
and The Gettysburg Address—dreaming
I’d be a policeman, secret agent
or quarterback for the Buffalo Bills one day.
Tuesday I woke to the radio.
The announcer talked about a man
I’d never heard of, shot
the night before.
All day the TV, radio and newspapers spoke
his name. They said he was a singer.
My mother said it reminded her
of when Bobby Kennedy was killed.
It was the first time I’d seen her cry
since my father moved out.
Sunday, a memorial service interrupted
grandpa’s football. My cousin and I
sat in front of that giant, oak-trimmed Zenith,
watched thousands crying in the rain
outside Lincoln’s Memorial.
They played one of his songs, the lyrics spun
in my brain like a scratched record:
I am the Walrus, Goo goo goojoob, spun
like Monsignor Mengie’s Good Friday sermon,
and in that moment I knew
nothing I thought I knew before mattered,
that somehow I was saved.
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For Mike, Going To War, Again
Has it been that long, twenty years
since we patrolled the neighborhood—
Deer Street, Leopard, Main—
dressed in our thrift store camouflage,
toy machine guns at our side, canteens
full of Kool-Aid? You thirteen and I
twelve, the year I had the home tutor,
and we spent New Year’s Eve
listening to Billy Idol and The Police,
smoking candy cigarettes,
dreaming of war.
How about that letter we wrote Melvin Tilly,
informing him
he was under surveillance
by the Junior Green Berets?
We watched triumphantly
from the Kapinski’s swing-set
Efran Lugo take the blame,
his mother decking him
right there in the driveway
with a powerful left.
Last night we talked on the phone
for the first time in years.
You are now a father,
years after
your own father died.
Remember his laugh,
the way he sang his love for Jesus
at those basement revivals
our mothers’ dragged us to?
I can still see him
playing a broom like a guitar,
dancing Chuck Berry style.
Today I’m in New York,
writing poetry, checking email
and you, in Texas,
preparing to go to war
again, the second time
in twelve years. I pray
you courage and a safe return.
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Copyrights @ Jason Irwin
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