Snow Job
Where are you Persephone? Your mother is freezing and taking the rap for you while
you’re cavorting with Hades or God knows who in the netherworld. Or maybe you’re
enjoying your stint as Queen in the land of the dead. Maybe it’s Demeter, your resentful
mother who hasn’t called you back yet from your winter recess to start the process of Spring
awakening. Too busy bickering about your abduction. Maybe she forgot to turn the page, as it were,
or seething with resentment at Zeus, she’s reluctant to. She more determined to nurse her
bitterness in the cold while the rest of us freeze than in welcoming her daughter for the season of
renewal. I heard that Zeus had his hand in your abduction. Be it as it may, it’s getting cold
up here and it’s the middle of March. Meanwhile, I’ll tell your mother to check her
calendar. If you’re not exactly in her house by this time, you certainly should be on your
way. Remember Zeus has already sent Hermes to tell Hades to let you go. I know he made you eat
that stupid Pomegranate fruit but he ain’t kidding nobody. Zeus wants you back! I want you
back. We all want you back, especially in New York City where we’re not used to this kind of
weather so late into the month. Are you so whipped by gusts of wintry venom that you forgot the date
of your return? Okay. So you’re not yet home. Maybe you got lost, can’t afford a Metro
card because Hades is stingy. But your mother and most of the eastern coast is waiting for you.
Please give us some of that warmth you’re famous for.
Frank De Canio__
____________________
Unfinished Business
If Schubert could do it, I’ll do one better. My symphony’s
consummately incomplete from the beginning. The signature
in my flat’s the opening key. Nothing to speculate about, no random notes in my music
room to be orchestrated by tomb raiders; no posthumous arrangement after my death. No
speculation as to why I stopped its inception when I did. Just a long-drawn-out diminuendo
that starts legato with no strings attached. The quiet work radiates off the page like a
Cabernet’s bouquet. It needs neither baton nor metronome. It’s keyed into
seething sympathies. Like loaves of leavened dough, it rises in silence. I give posterity
smoked piano on bar lines that aren’t drawn. The chord is my shepherd, I shall
descant; retards on my staff, they comfort me in the absence of my melodies. Major sharps
are flattened beyond repair. Tacit symbols clash against the passing winds; drums roll
into the distance. There’re processionals of pundits parsing empty staves in A flat
bridged with ties that boast subdued resolutions. My taciturn score unfolds in
schoolrooms, on turned-on laptops, and at business meetings. Its music’s piped into
children’s nurseries as they sleep. It’s heard in churches, as Low Mass -
between standby lines of the liturgy. It modulates through rosaries of meditation in
temples and monasteries. It’s performed by commuters who gaze musingly through bus
windows, tuned to horns like patrons of the Philharmonic. My ambitious work appears like
Minerva, pulled fully formed out of my dread. Its scales line my face. And designated
rests leave grace notes on tombstones trumpeting eloquence.
Previously published in The Puckerbrush Review, 2012
Frank De Canio__
Post Rosenkavalier
The Marschallin - guess what? She kicked the bucket!
See how they like that, those fat cat aristocrats
purring in ermine furs. Octavian - cock, dead
as the proverbial doornail - shudders; too distressed
over the loss of his erstwhile mistress
to caterwaul duets with Sophie, his bride of so many years.
Besides, he’s saddled with debts. Forget past sonorities!
Sopranos scaling solar heights morph as veiled encomiums
at disconsolate rites. Tears add tepid grains
of rice to Sophie’s disingenuous blush - her girth
wide enough to fill the Met with raucous laughter.
And ravages of arthritis make it easy to forget
the virgin fuss that cluttered up the stage
she’s soon about to exit with Octavian -
sullen witness to her age. See youth’s orchestral swoon
glean shards from a cloud-disheveled moon
that nearly hides from sight the stumbling
footman, his livery a little frayed from use.
No high-spirited dive for his mistress’ handkerchief
to bring the curtain down with crowning ceremony,
but his frown suggests: “Why the fuck am I schlepping this?”
Frank De Canio__
___________________
© Susan Weiman: IMG_0444.jpg
Ministrations
(of Christine O’Donnell, former Republican Senatorial candidate)
“If he can nurture himself, I mean then why am I here for?” the
winsome woman hoots through the wide-eyed gap in her toothsome smile. Poor little thing.
She feels left out of the ball game, put on the sidelines, a benched fielder pounding an
empty mitt, as it were; a spectator in a play conceived without her. “Give me
something to do,” she seems to pine, pondering the conundrum of self-indulgent
men.
I mused: “What about standing by him in sickness and in health; till
wealth do you smart and ask for a divestment of his assets. Okay let’s not get
encyclical here. Actually, you’re there like gaudy blossoms pillowing the earth, so
foragers on a beeline for your honey can pollinate your pistils. There you go! You mutated
to a true evolutionary biologist. How unwittingly Darwinian, so adaptively proactive:
we’re here to reproduce. Never mind puritanical prescripts. Even Jehovah
instinctively grasped the full scope of that anachronistic monkey business adjudicating in
the courtship rooms of Tennessee. Be fruitful and multiply. Put aside your right-wing
leaning dictates on the one hand, or right winging left-wingers who leave Freud on the
burner of their percolating concoctions: we’re here to reproduce. You grow, girl!
You’ve the right of way into his heart, albeit wrong roots of reason.
Poor little seething cauldron of a pressure cooker. You’re leery of
being outsourced by resourceful minds; displaced by the machinery at hand. Look at the
blight side. It affords only a small penchant of stock images with minimal interest. It
yields no crops, no returns for future generations to profit from. Indeed, no generation.
Their consummate executors resignedly bequeath our sun no burgeoning patrimony. Their
antsy handiwork’s passively produced, as it were, on fanciful copiers; digital
transfers of synthetic pictures on disposal CD’s in a cut and dried rubber
plant.
Indeed. What are you there for? You’re Hush Puppies as he toes the
line, plush carpeting in his homebody, blooming tulips on the table of his membranes, a
noodling bowl of soup to spoon with; a hot cup of meme sweetened with honey, a dash of
lemon crossing his T with an eye on his doting sensibilities to aid his misconception.
You’re there to keep hm aligned with the species and to mind the p’s and
q’s of your suffragette set. You’re the picturesque window opening up to spin
the loom of his woolly imagination, clear eyes in stormy weather and the belle’s
tether that draws him out of his caged complacency to stalk your wild side.”
Frank De Canio__
Street Wise
The Drilling Company moved from Ludlow Street’s Parking Lot and I forgot to bring
their new address with me. Walking out of the F train down Essex Street, the burly guy
I’d marked for assistance walked across the street when he saw me stopping beside
him. But I got more than I bargained for when I saw 5 girls conversing on the corner and
decided to interdict them to ask for directions. My eyes fixed on one of the 4 white girls
while asking for assistance, though my heart was with the black chick who seemed too hip
to give me the slip. “She’ll help you, the white girl said as they all
continued talking. Then, “What are you looking for?” my Nubian princess asked
me as the others dispersed, leaving me in her custody. Maybe they were asking for
directions too? “I’m looking for Orkard Street,” I said phonetically.
“Orkard Street? You mean Orchard Street,” she corrected me, like a teacher in
grade school. I did the same thing earlier with an Asian girl who got me there in the
first place. I had to repeat the street I was looking for 5 times before she maneuvered
through the thickets of my mispronunciation. “Yeah, Shakespeare in the Park. Yeah, I
know it!” she said with cocky insouciance as she rummaged through the options on her
cell phone. I was afraid to take too close a look at her, but she was breezily gritty with
looks to match. “Shakespeare in the Parking Lot,” I corrected her, while
biting my lip, lest I usurped the agency I banked on. It was the only time she fell
silent. “Yeah, I know Shakespeare in the Parking Lot,” she countered in
defense, “They used to be on Ludlow Street.” My affected shyness complemented
the surging interest I took in her. There were bars all over the place, so my guardian and
her cohorts must have been of age. But I don’t like subverting the kindness of
strangers, so I barely looked at her. Yet, though I saw a chic chick, I heard a teamster.
For she was cavalier using a popular 4 letter word, and it wasn’t love! “Okay,
this is what you need to do. And if somebody tells you something else, they’re
fucking lying!” Her cavalier cusses were filtered through her genial, rough-hewn
personality. She tossed them about like dressing on a table salad. Hell, she was Rosie
Perez in the body of Zoe Kravitz. “I tried small talk to ease my nervousness as she
hustled to get me on my way while 2 of the other girls were signaling for her to join them
across the street. She nodded impatiently, as I played up to her. “Yeah
they’re doing a play there tonight,” I assured her to allay any concern she
might have had about me. “I know Shakespeare in the Parking Lot,” she
insisted. “Well, you should come,’ I half jested, knowing she was en route to
probably bar hopping. “Maybe tomorrow,” I added to cover my footsteps. She
laughed, perhaps surmising that I was rising to the occasion. Or maybe she felt I was
easy! “Okay, it’s 112 Orchard St. I don’t know where, but it must be a
few blocks down from here and if you ask someone and they tell you somewhere else,
they’re fuckin lying! Don’t listen to them. See I can’t get a map with
this phone here,” she continued as I made to leave - against my wishes - not wanting
to try her patience. But patience she had as she now proceeded to map out the address and
pointed it out to me on her smartphone, while advising me what I needed to do. My mind
was set to go but my heart was fixed on this pert custodian who was being pestered by her
white sisters across the street to cede custody of her witless ward. I reluctantly eased
myself from her spell. Was ever captive set free boasting less enthusiasm? I don’t
think so.
Frank De Canio__
____________________
Budding Friendship
Now this former face in the crowd’s a voice with a distinctive tone structure.
My casual asides are sentences she pins on me like subliminal charges. Her interrogatory
air gathers fingerprints from the hand she’ll shake me down with for hormonal
glands. I’ve hidden histories with discreet misdemeanors. Disjunctive idioms are beau
conspirators she polygraphs for future use. Conversational exchanges give continuity to
disparate measures. We’re a work in progress, a symphony in see where it goes from
here, after she removes the slip from her sash register. I’m an unstrung gift box,
flashing its contents, my house undress tailored to her surmise. My cup runneth over and
she drinks deep or tastes not reverberating strings of my heart’s unsung measures.
My furtive thoughts morph into phonemes, words and phrases, culminating in
self-incriminating surrender. I’ve finished my sentence and, pigeonholed, I’m
remanded to her cell, where I get time off for food behavior till her discernment ends.
Frank De Canio__
