September 2017
John Allman
vikkat2@aol.com
Still writing poems, twenty years since my retirement from teaching.  They never raise hands to ask questions.  I guess now I'm the one with questions.  These two poems are from Older Than Our Fathers, which appeared as a chapbook in the online journal Mudlark, a collection about sons and fathers over three generations.  My grandfather was an Irish tenor in vaudeville; his son, my father, was a truck driver.

The Frolicking Friars                                 
    Cort Theater, July 14, 1921

I can imagine grandfather’s shoes,
a little scuffed from dancing,
his feet small. Never heard
his tenor voice rising to the quilted
loge, after the white-gloved minstrels
did their How I love ya, Sewannee,
 
the month Sacco and Vanzetti got convicted,
the month Hitler took over the Nazi party.
 
But here he is, opening his arms,
warbling to raise a few bucks for the benefit
of Friars,
his girl friend in the first row,
the first religious broadcast
whispering over the radio
hundreds of miles away
in Pittsburgh,
 
all that static the way space
collapses into the sound
of blood drying,   
                                    
into the half-marriage to a woman
he half-loves,
the song he sings with all his heart
in a theater half-full,
 
out there a world exhausted with saying
half the right thing, for half the right reason, all that fear
of nowhere
 
and the war that left so many
in trenches or hospital wards
where a shoe enters
a man's mind that is suddenly porous,
 
the singer dancing his way on someone else’s tongue,                                       
opening his mouth wide for the vowels that round
themselves into small fists like his son’s.





1942
      To seize and put into words, to describe directly
         the life of humanity  or even of a single nation,
         appears impossible.
                                                           Lev Tolstoy
 
So it's just me in the back room with pneumonia.
The insurance man in the kitchen asking
father when exactly the old man stepped off
the curb in front of the truck father was driving
for City Electric, how the body flew and the man's
banged head made the sound of rock on rock,
 
my chest gurgling, while Hitler's armies
have crossed Napoleon's line of advance
in two places, lungs locked in the Soviet cold
 
everywhere, even in my parents' small bedroom
when father awakes alarmed at the shadow that
is not there crossing the doorway, a fear
 
that is the famine of besieged cities
eating his years to come,
 
the old man forever sliding out on the morgue drawer,
a neatly stitched "Y" the way war
and traffic on a gray morning are sewn
 
into history, where loss repeats itself
while a father sits alone at a table, holding
his head, incalculable noise in the streets,
 
because there is really only the person,
the one person, over and over again
trying to breathe.   ​
​©2017 John Allman
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