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.

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
******************

TALK MORE NOW

For two hundred dollars an hour
I can get a doctor to tell me
why I talk to my dad more now
than when he was here.

Maybe as I get older
and closer to his age
I’m finally seeing things
the way he did or find some kind
of comfort in talking to him
from inside my head

Dad always got the tough jobs, you know,
and I, I was the toughest job he ever had.
I spat on people. They teased me.
I bopped them with my sister’s baton.
They teased me, and laughed at me.
I bit them on the ass.
They stuffed me in a garbage can.

So it fell to him to be the bearer
of the swift and mighty blow
to bring the little bastard to his senses
or to render him senseless so he
couldn’t hurt anyone for a while.

And eventually, somehow, it worked
I went from being mad at the world
and I became afraid of the world.
Afraid of the attic,
afraid to climb on the roof,
afraid to speak in class,
afraid to be laughed at, picked on,
beat up and beat down.
And afraid of the dark,
and afraid of my father’s voice

But these decades later I find
We talk more now
and I have a different view
of him and the twenty few years
we spent together.
I know he was winging it
and I was a whirling dervish.

- 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.

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.