Uncle Hy fiddles with two remotes—

one for the TV, one for the VCR—

the screen turns to static, then a game show,

then static again, then—he’s still fiddling—

 

the opening scene for Bonanza, September 14, 1961—

and there he is, galloping into town on his horse,

all duded up in wavy black hair and dimples,

dark eyes, striking as Grant and Gable

 

in his Hollywood handsome looks, save

for the elongated nose.  After the war

he hauled boxes of soda pop off a truck.

Nights he ushered downtown

 

where he’d stare at all the enormous stars,

already a little famous in Cain Park productions

in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, and at Corky’s

and Lenny’s Delicatessen where he’d arrive

 

fully costumed for the laughs.  He answered Ceceil’s ad

for a Jewish slave and drove out west

in a poor Ford.  There was a clown stint

on a kid show and a lurpy hospital aid bit part

 

on the Joey Bishop Hour and he dated

Jerry Lewis’ secretary.  Now, on the screen,

his horse rides into town, halts,—he swings down

onto the dark road in front of the saloon,

 

tough in silver-buttoned vest, Stetson,

bandana tucked below the chin,

clean face tinged with conniving.  We watch

from his couch in this messy condominium

 

on Fulton Street near Ventura Boulevard.

He’s 83 and leaning, one hand grasping his cane,

eating slowly the Salisbury steak from his meals-

on-wheels-microwave-heated dinner,

 

on the coffee table a stack of affidavits about

the ongoing lawsuit he’s enmeshed in against

his second ex-wife who, he claims, after

he signed over power-of-attorney, took everything—

 

the houses, the money, the son, and remarried,

and now he can’t afford the nursing home

he doesn’t want to move into—he’s approaching

an innocent woman, offering, with a dark grin,

 

to “escort” her, and she declines, politely,

and he comes closer, offers again in a voice

of false charm, and—suddenly, Hoss appears,

stock and solid, white hat, inquires of the woman

 

in his low voice:  “need any help, Ma’am?”

“No, thank-you,” she says with her voice but

“Yes, please,” she says with her eyes, and

Uncle Hy tells Hoss to “butt out,” and swings

 

his fist, and they fall into the dust, struggle,

and Uncle Hy takes out a gun, the camera

zooming in on the young woman’s face,

which twitches when the shot explodes,

 

and we watch Uncle Hy’s body writhing, loosening,

solidifying—the theme song rising, and, his name

not among them, the credits rolling, which,

Uncle Hy blurts out, as if from some horrid afterlife,

 

is when people really turn around and start watching.

 

 

 

 

 

Abraham’s breaking of the idols is one of my earliest stories,

and I imagined not the act of destruction, but the way

he climbed up on the roof all by himself and looked up at the sky

and imagined how it was all one thing—the stars, his thoughts,

even the pieces of the stone sculptures he smashed, even

his anger at his father for sculpting them, the way I was angry

at my father for the way he’d sip his coffee and lean against

the sink before driving off to the work he hated so that I could

one day grow up and imagine Abraham inventing a religion

that included a father’s obligations for his son.  Now

it’s the Sabbath, another result of that imagined imagining,

and my own child is sifting sand from sand on a summer morning

so indescribably beautiful you can’t help but grieve.

The shadowed wings of a turkey buzzard ascend the oaks and maples.

I heard that tale about Abraham in Sunday school.

I don’t remember the weather—spring or fall—only that

Abraham was just my age, a little frightened of the dark,

hiding from his punishment, but, nevertheless, listening.

 

 

 

 

Inside the narrow opening we stare up

through hemlock needles at the sky,

a winter blue tinged with late afternoon orange

 

during this, the worst blizzard in the history

of Western Pennsylvania:  work’s off, stores

shut down, even the reliable Interstate closed

 

east of Grove City all the way to the coast,

one hundred and some dead and still counting.

I followed as we trudged knee-deep through snow,

 

still accumulating, to the waterfall, frozen in air

except for what breaks through and rushes between

ice crusts to the Allegheny.  We hiked along the stream,

 

one deliberate boot-step at a time, to what you call

this Mayan monument, dug deep into the hillside, built

from rough stone dressed at the edges, block by block

 

charred by the raw wood extracted like magic

from chestnut and oak that filled this country until

swallowed by the money monsters, or so would claim

 

the neighbors of Christian Myers and Henry Bear,

after they moved in with intentions:  developers,

they called themselves, and the natives turned away

 

their faces, allowed them their bones for soup, ground

down, cooked over.  Before the entrance we kneeled

on our hands and knees and grabbed ahold and slid

 

slipping into the bosh,  the interior, the hearth,

the womb, you chanted, my earth creature,

drawn to tunnels and caves,  you know the secret openings,

 

the chambers where you’d sit  in silence for hours,

snowed in, boiling water on the woodstove to bathe.

You go down underground, to the roots if you have to.

 

We try to stand where they blasted away with pistons and drums

the non-essentials, one layer fuel, one layer ore,

what they called  charges, the way we strip down the dross

and the dirt until  the molten metal oozes and seeps

in fire and exits out the four notches of the soul.

I could tell you the chronicle, how one ton iron required

 

three tons ore, how all the furnaces  combined fifty tons

a week during the halcyon days, the pig metal transported

in flatboats to Pittsburgh, the wages good.

 

I could tell you production and profits, how in the end

they all failed,  abandoned in the panic:

We need the necessary amount of flux, you say,

 

hands smoothing the firebrick, to become fluid.