Futile Efforts (49 page)

when he could have accepted, lied

when he had a chance for truth, disappointed

instead of fulfilling her meager dreams,

ignored all her frail and weak moments

when he didn't offer enough of his own strength.

He's almost screaming now–howling into the horn

how he wants his Momma, his Ma,

his Mommy.

His number's on the Caller ID.
 
I leave the phone

off the hook and listen to his haunted murmurs

from across the room,

figuring I'll call him back

some night in the second week of May.

by Tom Piccirilli

First of all, I didn't even know he was Sicilian

until my mother died,

and my brother is talking to the priest, telling him

about our parents, the priest wanting to know,

making an issue here, needing to discover if they were
good
Catholics,

you understand, the man hoping to ascertain if they were good

people, good enough to be put in his ground,

although the Sicilian had already been in the earth thirty years.

And the priest asks where our father was born,

and my brother says Sicily, like that.

There shouldn't be another complication at your mother's funeral,

you should not have to bear more hardship,

you should not have to lift yourself off the ground

of yet another impractical revelation.

Here I am, 37 years old, and I had no idea.
  
The priest walks in

off the street, and he finds out about my Dad,

about my name,

but me, I'm standing the top of a mountain of graves,

I've been burying my blood since I was seven, but me,

this is the first time I'm hearing about this.

My father was from Sicily.

These are two blows cleverly concealed to appear as one–

it proves how little I know of the man,

and how little I know of me.

A dozen novels, two hundred stories,

a million words unfounded in a moment.
 
I've been

talking about truth, telling you all about truth,

sharing the truth of myself,

and I am as much a stranger to it as any of you.

I took down the man's scrapbook again–

peered at his sixteen-year-old face in the Philippines,

the magnificent youth that I never was,

the
hep
cat hero attitude in his
swabbies
,

cigarette tilted from his sweet lips.
 
I've been through

these pages fifty times in my life,

comparing, considering,

contrasting and correlating,

measuring,

pondering,

and still I've missed it.

There's a yellow letter here falling to dust,

the paper so worn that the words can hardly

be made out:

the thing is,

it's written by him,

by the Sicilian to his buddy,

talking about

staying low and kicking the
Japs
' asses,

sending them running back across the Pacific.

So look, over here

at this: something else I've never realized before–

it's written by him...by the man,

so why's he got it in his own scrapbook?

Fifty times and I've never seen it before,

but there,

in faded ink

are the barely perceptible words he read

at sixteen,

when his letter to his buddy came back:

deceased

return to sender.

I can consider and correlate,

contrast the thickness of the hair on my forearm

to his,

measure the cap size and shoe size,

endlessly ponder the grin,

but when it comes down to it,

I can never,

really, any longer

compare.

by Tom Piccirilli

-a-

We walked around her backyard discussing school

while her mother and sisters and aunts and grandmother

flowed behind us like a wedding train

of polyester.
 
She tugged me forward and I tugged her back

and our lips met.
 
Grandma yelled in Italian

and came charging.
 
It made me think.

-b-

We were on the floor of her college dorm room,

the music next door so loud that I could barely focus

and find what the hell I was aiming at.
 
She said

my name and it sounded so strange that I thought

she was talking about someone else.
 
Whoever he was,

he made me angry.

-c-

She was cheating on her husband and liked me

because I would listen.
 
She had a laugh designed

to turn everybody's head.
 
She'd use it on me

even under the sheets, like she was trying to call

anyone else nearby into the room with us.
 
Her

husband phoned twice and she used it on him too.

-d-

I'd met her in an ice cream parlor, lost touch

for twenty years and ran into her again at a party.

She called me Neal in the shower, then apologized,

then called me Neal on our second go-around.
 
At

3am she thought I was sleeping and phoned Johnny

and told him how much she hated Neal.

-e-

She was cheating on her husband and liked me

because I would listen.
 
We spent New Year's

watching a Stark Trek marathon while he decided

if he was gay or not.
 
They were in counseling

and he was having fantasies.
 
She said she didn't like

the idea of it.
 
Neither did I.

-f-

I was drunk and so was she, and we grabbed a bottle

and headed back to her place.
 
We started going at it

on her couch, and when I looked up her three kids were

standing in the doorway saying they were hungry.
 
In

about five minutes they were calling me Uncle Tommy and

asking if I was moving in.
 
I left her the bottle.

-g-

We spent all our days and nights together for a month,

laughing and enjoying life again, whispering about marriage,

about how it had been a long fight but worth it all

so we could find each other.
 
Her father hated my guts and

said my hands were soft.
 
He took a poke at me with his

welder's fists.
  
I flattened his ass, and that was the end of that.

-h-

Please, she said, I want to see your poems, so I showed her.

She didn't want to see them, instead she wanted to show me

hers.
 
One was about a bad love affair with a needle freak.

Another where she screwed three Harlem Globetrotters

one night.
 
Another where she wanted to be cut to the bone.

She asked what I thought and I told her we should be friends.

-
i
-

She was cheating on her husband and liked me

because I would listen.
 
She told me all her dreams and fears

and asked me mine.
 
I had plenty but couldn't quite get them

out.
 
The more I tried the more it hurt.
 
I took a walk in the park

and fed the pigeons.
 
I was starting to think that maybe I should

listen less and start talking more.

by Tom Piccirilli

I was inside for a time and given my own bed, in a line

of nuthouse munchkins, all of them so damn chatty

and almost as bad with the questions as the doctors,

hip with the flattery, everybody trying to get inside

my head, as if

that's where they wanted to be.
 
Trying to see

through my eyes, to paint the world with my palette,

all of them looking for my notebooks

under the pillow,

in the mattress,

beneath the plants on the windowsill.

Feeding me purple pills, the nurses took down their notes

and I took down mine,

and the paranoia caught fire across the ward, these ladies

wondering what I'd put down,

if I was a liar, if I was sane

enough to notice their cold hands on my wrists, the sweet

depth of their blatant voices

that gave me chills.
 
We circled one another like dogs,

trying to see what could be seen,

trying to beat each other at the same game.

90 days later they cut me loose

and stood trembling

on the stair with a palpable despair, wondering what

I would dare speak of on the page,

of my rage, of how I got so sick

and how I grew well

in their cleanest

cage, what I would bare, what I would tell,

and what I would never speak of again.

Let's put it this way,

I'm over here

and they're all still there