Sixteen Inches on Center

SIXTEEN INCHES ON CENTER

Father viewed through a grown son's eyes.

By Anthony Buccino

Seeing a father through a grown son's eyes. The son of a World War II veteran looks at the 20-plus years they had together, the missteps the missed opportunities, and the things that remain.

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AQUARIUM

AQUARIUM

Somehow it seemed
I got everything I wanted.
I wanted a German shepherd,
I got a mutt named Butch.

I wanted an aquarium
just like my friend Rich had.
His had guppies and swordfish
and neon tetras, catfish and snails, too.

I wanted an aquarium
and the fish and the purple gravel
and the lighted lid and aerator pump
and the wrought iron stand
that went with it all.

I wanted to set up the pump
that made the bubbles
come out of the diver's mask.

Dad said no to the fish tank
and Ma said I'd pay for it myself
and Dad said, in his best dad voice,
"That's not the point."
He never said what the point was.

My aquarium had angel hair in the filter
and fish down below a floating wooden block
the turtles sat on after I fed them baloney
in the water, or until they got soft and died.

On the bottom, in the gravel
I set up Dad’s shells from the Fijis.
Rich and I kept Grant's pet department
going and made fun of the old lady
who sold plecostomus catfish.

My guppies all ate their babies
and the other fish got ich.

I kept that aquarium through
my teen years and then
set it up again in my house.

But lately it's been in the attic
for how many years, who knows?
I know now I never knew
what I wanted
and I still don't.

- By Anthony Buccino
from SIXTEEN INCHES ON CENTER

Copyright © 2010 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved. Photos and content may not be used for commercial purposes without written permission.

YOUR BIRTHDAY

YOUR BIRTHDAY
Jersey City, NJ

In honor of your birthday
I fed the pigeons on the pier.
A few showed up, then a few more.

Seagulls arrive to watch from a distance
Squawk for their friends to join the scrim
For pieces of bread I've cast off for them
Into the Hudson River shallows

But mostly today,
in honor of your birthday
I fed the pigeons
on the pier.

- By Anthony Buccino
from SIXTEEN INCHES ON CENTER

For my dad, the proud pigeon flyer.
Copyright © 2010 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved.

OLD MAN

OLD MAN

How patient you were as you watched me play with my plastic men on the carpet strewn
with dead soldiers, scattered toy guns and tanks.
The explosion noises I made with my child’s mouth were some ironic twist to your fate.
For here you were, spending your lifetime to forget what your son innocently brings up again in your face.
After all this time I realize I spent my time trying to be you.
And you, you spent your time trying to forget what you’d been through.
I’m sorry if I ever hurt you, Dad,you know it wasn’t like that.
I was just a blond-haired kid doing what little boys do.

- By Anthony Buccino
from SIXTEEN INCHES ON CENTER
Copyright © 2010 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved.
Old Man first published in Raving Dove Online Literary Magazine
******************

WHAT PA DIDN’T SAY

WHAT PA DIDN’T SAY

Dad was never much of a talker a few words here and there

a short story in an economy of words about the adventures of one of his homers
Dad was never much of a writer 

He never left a note to say he was running out for breakfast
or would be back in a little while so it was a great surprise for all
when some of his Guadalcanal letters appeared more than twenty years
after he passed away we met my father as a young man we never knew

His long forgotten letters to his buddy back home showed a man who misses his family and the long years he was overseas as censors cut out little holes the Japs would never see

He wrote of something he saw but will never forget and never said what it was
but it was what silenced him for all those years we knew him.

- By Anthony Buccino
from SIXTEEN INCHES ON CENTER
Copyright © 2010 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved.

WAR MOVIES

War Movies

The louder the better it always seemed. No matter.
He always fell asleep before John Wayne won the war
or the sad dog whimpered at the cavalryman’s fate.

Who knew what he knew?
He never said anything except to mention malaria
and those old photos we found of native women in grass skirts.
But that was such a small part of the things he carried inside.

It wasn’t jolly, or fun.
It wasn’t something you could say.
The best you could do was build something new.
And when you’ve exhausted your body as much as your soul
turn on an old war movie and sleep through this TV play
as you dream of the past war and remember noises
no orchestra could drown.

- By Anthony Buccino
from SIXTEEN INCHES ON CENTER
Copyright © 2010 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved.

OVERALLS

OVERALLS

People laugh at the Li’l Abner look where the tops of my shitkickers
have a large gap to the bottom of my pin-striped bib overalls.
Don’t the stripes make me look taller?
It’s not the effect you see in these overalls.
I wear them because they are functional,
made of tough material, and have lots of pockets
and a twisted loop for my 16-oz. Stanley hammer.

Your pockets can get full of Sheetrock bits
and you won’t get into any kind of laundry trouble.
I’ve worn through a lot of solid blue bib overalls, myself.
Dad used to get me them at a great price at a little store
called Walensky’s on Bloomfield Avenue in Montclair.
Maybe that’s where he got this pair?
This pair of white overalls has blue vertical stripes.
I had two pairs like this once, but one plumb wore out.
These bibs fit Dad to a T you can bet.
His legs were shorter than mine,
and his belly, well, that’s another story.
I don’t want another pair for Christmas or my birthday.
This pair I save for special working occasions
like heavy yard work, or painting something.
I’m trying to make these engineer overalls last forever


- By Anthony Buccino
from SIXTEEN INCHES ON CENTER
Copyright © 2010 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved.
******************

TURPS

TURPS

When girls say turps for turpentine
It rubs me the wrong way.
I’m jealous they had it better
With their fathers than I did with mine.
Their fathers shared the lingo
Turps for turpentine.
Shortcuts for washing
A soaked paint brush.
Girls who learned to hammer
And built things with their dads
And climbed ladders to rooftops
And snapped the blue plumb line for dad
It rubs me the wrong way.
They did boy things with dad
And dad passed along how tos.
And forever their little girls
Spend a lifetime now saying
Turps for turpentine.

- By Anthony Buccino
from SIXTEEN INCHES ON CENTER

Copyright © 2010 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved.
Turps first published in The Idiom
******************

BURNING LEAVES

Mesmerized by the roaring flames
from the pit and pile of sparking arcs
as black walnut tree leaves caught fire
and withered to smoke and ash
while the breeze cast a sooty fog
over my clothes and our large yard.
A private and small fireworks show:
Embers burst in midair singeing
my eyebrows and dirty blond hair
burning holes in my sweatshirt
as rotten logs smoldered into charcoal.
A neighbor girl's voice called out
from an open window some where
"Why don't you jump in!"
And there I was, welcomed,
to our new neighborhood,
the long lot and black walnut trees
towering over the patches of grass
and the oversized brick garage
and the ruinous chicken coop blocks
In the distance beyond the sound of the fire
Dad paced off placement of Soho Loft
His pigeon coop and sanctuary.

- By Anthony Buccino
adapted from SIXTEEN INCHES ON CENTER

Copyright © 2010 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved. Photos and content may not be used for commercial purposes without written permission.

FIXING THE ROOF

Carpenter Street, Belleville, N.J.

Squirrels ate a hole in our roof.
They came and went
in our attic as they pleased.
At night you could hear them
doing the things squirrels do at night.
At first, Dad put a metal plate
over the hole to keep them out.
It didn’t work.
They scampered at will
across the sharp sloped roof
from high branches in the black walnut
and they had all day and night
to chew their way back in.

Now, I had seen Dad repair other people’s roofs
and I figured he’d do ours on a Saturday
wearing a blindfold.
But the reality I didn’t understand
was that the slope was too steep for him
and that now, unnoticed,
he had grown too old for the job,
deciding to leave the ladder
and the shingle bundles
to younger men who reminded him
of himself a long, long time ago,
before I knew him.

- By Anthony Buccino
from SIXTEEN INCHES ON CENTER
Copyright © 2010 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved.

MONEY IN NEWSPAPERS

Gless Avenue, Belleville, N.J.

The neat stacks of old newspapers
might have led you to believe
that Gramma intended to read
the rooms full of back issues
and headlines of earlier years
or she planned to write
her life story based on news events.
But Gramma could not read
though she could figure
and track your rent payments
these English words were a big blur
and the future not all that much better.
Gramma Silverhair had her reasons
for filling up rooms
with old newspapers she would never read.
It was all about the numbers
she would tell herself and no one else.
For in her old age
she trusted no one beyond herself.
Gramma grew all she needed in her yard there
with the grapevines and fig trees
and the chickens, the eggs and all.
The many cats had kittens
and she drowned the ones she had to
and left the rest to kill the mice.
On the back porch in the Garden State air
she dried green, orange
and yellow speckled gourds
and when we shook them,
the seeds inside rattled like castanets.
The fresh cool water from two hand-dug wells
lost its worth, its importance in daily life
when the town water came into the house.
It might have been needed some day
with all the papers there.
Those old newspapers held so
precious to her heart, left behind
when she died, the dollar bills fell out.

- By Anthony Buccino
from SIXTEEN INCHES ON CENTER
Copyright © 2010 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved.

ROBIN

Carpenter Street, Belleville, N.J.

We saved a baby robin
from its fate of abandonment.
We used an eyedropper
and fed it milk-soaked bread
until it graduated
to pieces of worms from our garden

And we kept it in a spare canary cage
on our back porch
where the wind blew
in through the screens

And gave it water
and fed it
and watched it fly
from the shelf
to wooden Brookdale soda crates
to the newspaper piles
back to the shelf.

That red-breasted robin grew
and I taught it
to hold onto my finger
and later onto a stick
and then a branch I held out

And one time
when it was stronger
I took it into the yard.
Ma took a black and white picture
of that little bird and me

That was the day it flew
from the stick in my hand
to a low-hanging branch.

And like a foolish little brother
there I stood with my finger out
expecting the weightless robin
to come land again,
Be fed again
Return to its cage again

When I looked up
it flew over me
And chalked
on my forehead

- By Anthony Buccino
from SIXTEEN INCHES ON CENTER
Copyright © 2010 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved. Photos and content may not be used for commercial purposes without written permission.
See also: First robin of spring and the fifth grade science project

NEEDLE

Gless Avenue, Belleville, N.J.

We lived the cliché: Grandma downstairs
without a word of English;
Children frightened by the needle
she proffered and the thread;
And by the big old woman, herself
whose strange breath and odd teeth
and white-yellow hair
framed her large nose and haggard face;
She cornered the little girls – my sister
and two cousins on the stairs
as they tried to pass by in play,
talking in a gibberish tongue
thrusting a needle at their eye
as a thread danced in the breeze,
a kite tail without its cross ties,
held tightly in the swollen,
battered, stuttering old hand.
What she wanted must be so obvious.

- By Anthony Buccino
From SIXTEEN INCHES ON CENTER
From AMERICAN BOY: Pushing Sixty
Copyright © 2010 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved.

LUMBER

Honey sweet smell, pungent and green
(If you know what green smells like.)
Scent lingers, full of warm, cozy memories.
Sawdust covered floor, slippery, dangerous.
Shop floor of shaved wood curls,
Sharp slivers and needlepoint splinters.
Underfoot, remnants of long ago projects:
Bent nails cast off in yellow pine,
Blocks of trimmed wood and clipped dowels,
Chiseled chunks that made way
for a shiny brass door hinge.
Two by four beams sweat sap
Despite the trip through the kiln
And the long ride
From the mill up north
To this dusty old lumber yard
Where weathered carpenters
In torn overalls pick and choose
From the straight and true beams.

SIXTEEN INCHES ON CENTER
- By Anthony Buccino
Copyright © 2010 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved.

Book covers

Most of the poems on this site have been collected in one or more of the following books.

Copyright © 2010 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved. Photos and content may not be used for commercial purposes without written permission.