From Jan. 9-17 2010 (in progress)

Heart of gold in gruff exterior
Describes the old man cycling the back lot
Of his bike shop neighboring the museum
Featuring taxidermized owls and foxes
And sundry things culled from others' attics.
They are having a dispute, this gruff old man
And the museum director whom to reporters
Has frequently catalogued the other's isdeeds.
But things observed change according to observer:
When on guard, he seems pensive
As he applies his wrench to one more used machine,
Renewing its life, releasing a lever,
And lowering the bike onto the concrete,
For a needy kid quotes the cub reporter,
Which makes the usually pacific museum director
Fume! Leading him to relate the man’s misdeeds:

No one knows the old man like I do.
All they can see is that he potters in the back lot
With the broken bikes he claims to fix for kids.
The reporter writes about the heart of gold
Behind the gruff exterior, the old man and his bike shop.
I’m the one who knows just what the old man’s like.
I overhear the things he says, on skin color,
sexual preference, gender. Who hasn’t heard him
When someone parks in the back lot of his shop?
He fools you by circling there to test a bike.
But a citizen found her stolen bike in their shop once.
And he goes along, just pottering around, who knows
What he does there? Whose stolen bike he fixes?

But the reporter who’d written gruff exterior
With heart of gold never returned my voice message.
As the woman who’d lost her bike had said “In Maine
I was used to gruffness followed by genuine helpfulness.
But this is a saltiness to which I am not accustomed.
Among those curses I failed to hear any heart of gold.”
So I’d like to get the story straight with the media tonight.
Who knows how many innocent ears he has bent
In the back lot from which he drive away my customers
With curses when you choose not to be around?
Name the children whom this Santa has given a bike.
Name the beneficiary. Where’s the heart of gold, the sainthood?
REPLY
Well first, we’re a small paper, with few resources, less time.
And time, which is money, we never had for such a feature,
What with the wires giving us the features of the day,
and just ourselves to edit it. Oversights happen, OK?
But of the reporter of which you complain, we can say,
And with no small amount of empathy for how you feel,
That we put credence in his judgment, so if his judgment
Is that the old man is good, that his heart is made of gold,
But his exterior gruff, then we are swayed and have no choice
But to trust him, because those who sense gold hearts have
Gold hearts themselves, and as professionals and citizens,
We believe in the good instead of the worst, choose also
Not to overturn the stones in the field to see what they hide.
So we choose to trust the merits of our intrepid reporters,
Whose jobs are by the way are not easy, who are buffeted
By multitudes of voices with frequently contrary claims.
*****************************
Look. This guy’s bad news. Just hear him rant.

When he got wind of what they'd said of him
he oiled up his ancient rusty Remington
and drove across the border for his shells.
He joked with the cashier, who couldn't smell
his liquor breath, the flask stuffed in his jacket,

who had he known, could’ve cared less anyway.
He'd a coy-dog problem and people problem too,
with peaceniks and tree-huggers, had a problem
with rats and cats and creatures of the field
blasting rock salt through the stars could not cure.

In his daydreams, he'd crash past the ticket-taker
Of the Museum of Relics in White River Junction
shatter the glassed-in displays with his rifle-butt
and topple the stuffed animals, all foxes and owls,
nocturnal beasts of the field you never see

in deer season, spent half-drunk dressing them,
a buck strung against the barn of the family dairy farm,
the premises gone since to a lawyer or a surgeon,
deer-blood dripping to fertilize the white clover
that dotted the tire-tracks of the tractor or horse-cart.

Where a hunchbacked farm-hand might settle
On a plank bench on his coffee-break to drink
The pure and unpasteurized milk from which
He’d have to brush the flies from the pitcher.

Damnit he'd never seen so much junk in his life,
not even among his old lady's rich relatives.
At least in his bike-shop he used the salvage up,
At least he didn’t frame it for eternity--
and if this was the last thing that he ever did,

he'd rebuild another butterfly-handled bicycle
equip it with an unrusting brightly-ringing bell
for another poor kid who'd otherwise be getting by
Christmas and Easter on Catholic Services
Which, to confess all, was mostly his story too.

But no one was going to park in his lot,
Not even the ticket-taker, fetching as she was.


Yes he'd charge into the shop and overturn the stuffed animals,
the screech owl in flight, the red fox coiled as if about to spring,
or recoil from ground that was only a pedestal with a brass plaque.
He continued to stumble through the museum of relics and curiosities
smashing glass with the stock of his rusty but newly oiled hunting rifle.
Christ he'd seen better things in neighbor's homes, hunting trophies,
the heads of eight-point bucks pinned above fireplaces, not butterflies
trapped in glass bells lined with pool-table velvet, nor ticket stubs
to side-shows or to old steam trains he'd known but never missed,
like the one in the back yard they'd cover in Plexiglas if they could.
His mother'd flagged one down across the road from one address
when his father had been drunk for whom he hadn't shed a tear
when he passed away, a violent drunk and a woodsman.

No he wouldn't deal with such an SOB now with his liver and lungs.
He didn't care how much glass in the museum of curiosities he'd break,
his organs on the mend. When the ticket-taker would ask him
what he'd like he'd sweep past her, go to the heart of the problem,
this was the Director of the Museum of Curiosities and Relics.
Who’d ratted him out (he heard) to the newspapers.

[All politics is local my friend]

1/9/10

The guests would pay, and the hotelier would feel like a fool,
what for insulting his wife before the post office like that,
although then he wouldn't know just who dumped
a gallon of kerosene into the hotel pool.
Anyway, the fat man could always drain his damned pool.
But as to his wife, no one would get away insulting his girls.
Returning home he reeled with gratification
you’d get punching out an army buddy who'd been too big
[you’d get during a punch-out with an army buddy who’d been
Too big for his britches]
for his britches, then after showing him just who you were,
make up by buying him another frosty at the Eagles' Club,
then beat him silly and afterward laugh it up in a cramp

but the old man was a screwball alright and as sure as shit
was his old man too. His old man was just a piece of shit,
never an hour without him being on the sauce. Or was nothing,
just a pile of waffle batter, who just sat there, the old man
just sat there, he was as useless as a pile of waffle batter,
he'd sit all day complaining and was useless, just a nobody
mean as a guard dog people would feed cups of liquor to,
a toothless guard dog chained to a fence, trained to bare

his absent teeth to the first passerby. But a dog
that in its day and cage had been as frightful as a baited bear.

before he'd gone in the service when it was a sure thing she wouldn't return,
no he wouldn't deal with such an SOB now with his liver and lungs.

Many know him as a gruff old man test-riding his bicycles in the back-lot of the shop where he fixes bikes the old-fashioned way, one by one. Some know him as a shop owner with a heart of gold, dispensing free bikes to needy children in the neighborhood. Others only know his salty tongue and gruff demeanor as he upbraids drivers parking in his lot, which he shares with a museum of freaks and oddities. The museum director spoke to us briefly of the troubles he'd experienced with the shop owner. I also spoke with the mother of one of the recent beneficiaries, who claimed there were many like her who'd received bikes gratis from the old man, whose pleasure in life seemed to be to fix old bikes and then to make them shiny new again.

See the wedding photo.
She’d been warned
He had a screw loose—
My father’s eye was wild.