OVERLOOK

On the street named Overlook
many years ago, a decade or two or so
somebody’s little brother, or maybe
It was somebody’s little sister,
drowned in a family pool when
everyone thought someone else
was watching and nobody was.

The street is set on the
terrace side of a High Street hill,
you see, with houses higher
on one side than the other.
The low side yards back
Spring Garden School and field.
A hidden walkway prevails
& school children walked the path
for decades back and yet to come.
You walk the street now and hear
the children play and there’s hardly
A thought, and certainly no plaque
For that drowned little boy, or girl.

-- Copyright © 2010 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved.

FIRST TIME

For Catherine

The first time you find yourself out of work
It hits you with surprise
After all these years in this same place
And now it's over.

Sometimes you blame yourself
What you could have, should have,
Would have done
But the shock sets in
And freezes something inside
As if it's always your fault

You try to remember that first day
You started at this place
And the first time you walked in
And the friends you know and knew
And all the triumphs and flops
You've been through

You break the spell and wonder
What tomorrow will be like
How can this happen to me
What did I do wrong
How can I fix the unfixable
Where do I begin
What about my family
How will we ever get through this

The first time you find yourself
Out of work
You feel you're in a world of trouble
And you feel you’re in it all alone

- By Anthony Buccino
From CANNED - Booted, bumped, down-sized, fired, forced out, hated, hired, jobless, laid off, let go, out of work, out-sourced, pink-slipped, terminated, sacked, unemployed
Copyright © 2010 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved.

WAITING FOR THE BUS

Belleville, N.J.

Cars speed down Franklin Avenue.
A small curb, two breakaway traffic signs,
a concrete trash can and a fireplug
protect me from skidding chunks
of steel, glass, plastic and rubber.

Up the block old men cross
to the Chandelier Restaurant
in the rain. The cars do not slow,
the old men time them as they pass,
then muster all their speed to scoot across.

When it rains at the bus stop, you get wet.
An umbrella might help a little bit,
but you get wet.
Duck in the doorway of the Bank of America
but keep an eye on the traffic up at the light,
that’s the first place you’ll see the bus
coming for you.

In the doorway of the bank
you stand out of the rain
but you’re still out in the rain.
Your umbrella here is as useless
as a three-dollar bill. You get wet.

At Continental and Franklin, sometimes
waiting here for the bus, you smell burgers
or something else cooking at Wendy’s.
Did you know General Washington marched
by this very corner a few hundred years ago.
Makes you wonder what the traffic was like
crossing this road in 1776 with British troops
not so far behind trying to take your fare?

I remember when A & P was where Wendy’s is.
Teen Angel and I went to buy stuff kids buy
at the supermarket and we’d dally a bit after paying
to check out the beautiful blond checkout girl
who wore short skirts. She was always nice to us.
Her younger sister was equally beautiful.
She was our grade but she was one of those girls
who was too beautiful for plain Joes to talk to.
She ran with an older crowd.

Maybe the A & P moved out already
before the building burned down to the ground,
I’m not sure anymore.
Nowadays, there’s a new, bigger A & P
around the corner a ways
where the Acme used to be
on Belleville Avenue in Bloomfield.

When it was the Acme store, my mom
won a diamond pendant in a giveaway.
They called to say she’d won, she thought
it was a joke. She never won anything.
There was that once on Bowling for Dollars
when she was the home winner.
And a few times she finally won at Bingo!
Splitting $25 with eleven other winners.

My sister won the raffle once
at the Holy Family bazaar.
I remember she gave some money
to the little girl who picked her winning ticket.
My sister used to take the bus from this street
to the subway to her key punch job
at Mutual Benefit. When she was late for work,
teasing her hair or putting on makeup,
she asked Mom to drive her
to this bus stop on the corner
or if she was real late
to the subway station on Fifth Street.
The same place I’m heading this very day.

If there was one thing Mama didn’t like
it was driving in rush hour traffic.
When she was a girl she lived in Newark
and took the trolley everywhere.
When I was a boy, we took the 37 bus
to the old subway and shopped downtown
at Bamberger’s department store.
If I wasn’t too much of a pest, she bought me
a hot dog and orangeade at the basement stand.
Like those Presidential Subway Cars, that A&P
and Bamberger’s, though, Mama is gone.
Here, the bus is coming for me.

- By Anthony Buccino
From VOICES ON THE BUS
Copyright © 2010 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved.

FINALLY

Finally morning arrives
after the restive night
away from the moments
that stirred this soul
in a cauldron of misspent efforts
the deeds undone,
the work to do
the deeds half done,
the work to re-do
the lapses in judgment
when you did those things you do
And now you can’t take it back
and they stir you from your sleep
like that cradle in the top of the tree
each night before morning
when the wind blows.

- By Anthony Buccino
From CANNED - Booted, bumped, down-sized, fired, forced out, hated, hired, jobless, laid off, let go, out of work, out-sourced, pink-slipped, terminated, sacked, unemployed
Copyright © 2010 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved.

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.

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

LAKE ERIE AT SUNSET

June 1976, Ashtabula, Ohio

Green waves crash again and again
on the gray blocks of the breakwall,
A glowing orange sun sets in a hazy horizon,

An old man in a tattered suit fishes
for two hours with two rods outfitted
with two open-face spinning reels;

He caught two sheephead
with crippled worms on bent steel
and tonight it will be his meal.

"There's other fish to catch --" he says
sucking in breaths of the sea air,

"Perch, and salmon, and great ones!"

But he's only got the two fish
at the end of a drag line
floating in stagnant water.

His dirty fingernails and dusty boots
are lonely for the other hundred people
who usually fish here on the breakwall
at night.

"It's cold -- he says in a harmless
old man's dirge.
It's beautiful, I think in a silent gaze;
The waves, the lake that ends beyond
the wide, wide horizon;

It's breezy, with the wind ripping
through the checkered shirt
and the old man is tired.

The sudsy green waves crash against
the huge gray blocks of stone.
They did it today
They'll do it tomorrow…

Discarded beer and soda pop cans,
and green slimy driftwood
All in different stages of decomposition,

Rotting fish and crusty skeletons
decorate the shallow marsh
this side of the breakwall.

The sun has set, the light grows dim,
The old tanned leather-faced fisherman
takes in his lines and leaves.

It's not his life, this lake
but it make his day…

Young long-haired people in curtained vans
And young couples in love
swallow the crisp Lake Erie breezes
Listening in half-deafness
to the rush of the waves.

Great cargo ships as long as
skyscrapers are tall
Chug west on the flat greenness
of the lake;

A yellow Bug and an M&M green Datsun
Stand quiet in the gathering darkness
of the mellow night
So full and rich with the calmest
sounds of the sea.

June 1976, Walnut Beach, Ashtabula, Ohio
- By Anthony Buccino
From DAYS YOU KNEW ME
Copyright © 2010 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved.
 Photos and content may not be used for commercial purposes without written permission.