NOTHING LIKE MINE

His hands are nothing like mine.
His hands were flat like a two by six.
His fingers flat and as wide as one by twos
and tapered at the fingertips like shims.
His legs are not like mine.
His legs were stout and bowed
like warped four by sixes tossed aside
to get to the straight and true wood.

His eyes are nothing like mine.
His eyes were steely sea-grey
and women loved to stare into them.
It skipped me and left me
with light brown, almost hazel, eyes.
And I laughed when he wore
those Clark Kent glasses
to read the news
and needed a magnifying glass
to see the dates on the coins
he was collecting
“without tying up too much change,”
for me.

His arms are nothing like mine.
His arms were rock-hard, muscular.
You’d swear he could whup Superman
in an arm-wrestling contest,
yet, firmly, gently hold a homer
to read its silver leg band
or flair out its wing feathers
or check its nest for squabs.

His aim was nothing like mine.
His aim was true
from his jungle cannon.
He used high school calculus
he learned to send
his rockets glare
to the spot Marines called,
there on Guadalcanal.
He’d had enough of that
for generations.

My aim, decades later
at pheasants taking flight
as if they were dad’s homers
stealing him away from me,
dropping those beautiful ringnecks
like Zeroes from the sky.

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

PIGEON MAN SECRETS

Nutley, N.J.

“Like ants,” he said, “they look”
he sees them mornings from his
kitchen table in the yellow house
off Kingsland Street on Brookdale.
He watches their cars stop in traffic.
The hurried bodies pack up and depart
buzz and amble to the corner
wait for traffic to break at Roche.
Hordes would cross, cars would creep,
it was almost better than television.

Turn your feet sideways to step
up the half-size attic stairs
and even at that, a child’s foot
would overhang and a ladder’s rung
seemed gigantic to the tiny step
on up those stairs to where my Dad worked
one day and actually let me tag along
and stay out of the way
to play in the dust and the dirt.

Up in that attic Mitch’s old foot locker
held the stories
long-forgotten and scribbled
by much younger men
discovered six decades after the war
the visions of the Panama Canal
and the wonder of the locks;
and the Marines’ field day shooting
Zeros from the skies over the jungles
of Guadalcanal and the Fijis;
and the loneliness
came alive with the longing for
the Charms Candy factory in Bloomfield,
and the pigeon lofts of home.

In August the young soldier
wrote his best friend
at home the war would be over soon
and he’d be home by Christmas.
But what none
of them knew
was how many more years
it would be
before he again saw his mom,
apple pie, his gal,
or the pigeon loft he left behind.

- By Anthony Buccino
from SIXTEEN INCHES ON CENTER
Copyright © 2010 by Anthony Buccino