About this poem:  I received an email last fall inviting me to be the guest poet at a high school in Chicopee, MA, and I agreed because it was my father's birthplace and I'd never been there. When I arrived I discovered that the school, Pope Francis High School, was the product of two merged high schools including Cathedral, my mother and Uncle Peter's alma mater. My uncle later became the principal. It was a homecoming to a place I'd never been! I wrote "Chicopee Falls, 1926" to read to the students.


CHICOPEE FALLS, 1926
 

My father presses against the walls of Nanny’s womb,
pausing before sliding into this world. Nanny flinches
from the doctor’s icy stethoscope in the drafty house
as Pop waits in the living room, whiskey and cigar 
ready for the doctor’s call, he hopes, of “It’s a boy!”
 
Eileen, now two and three quarters,
listens – her ear cupped to the hallway wall.
She’s told Dad about Pop’s drinking and gambling,
about the movie theater won in a poker game
and lost weeks later at a boxing match.
 
He’s felt the steady rhythms of Nanny’s long shifts
at the carpet factory and heard the doors slam
after Pop’s empty days of door to door sales.
He vows not to cry. Not in the cold air of today.
Not ever. He vows to grow fast, move far.
 
Out the window, stubborn leaves cling to the elms,
a sliver of moon hangs in the November sky.
It’s 1926. My father relaxes his pressure
against the walls of Nanny’s womb, rolls over,
crosses his arms, closes his eyes, says “Ready.”





BISHOP PIKE’S UNDERSHORTS
 

Maggie's telling us at lunch how her 88-year-old mother kept insisting a picture
of some cousin was her own long dead brother and how Maggie'd set her straight
but her mother kept insisting. "Maggie," I said, "Can't you just give it to her?"

And rubbing it in, I told a story about my mother, who, one Christmas
near the end, thought I was my father, squeezing my hand,
laughing at some shared Springfield memory and I played along
 
since it was the most she'd said all day. But what I didn't tell Maggie
was how I'd had decades of preparation living elbow to elbow
as a know-it-all teen with two grandmothers killing time in my living room.
 
I can't remember who moved in first: Granny after Grandpa died or Nanny
after her second heart attack, but by the summer of 1966, they'd taken over
Ellen's room and the eight of us were sharing one bathroom at 21 Oval Avenue.
 
They called each other Mrs. Loughran and Mrs. Powers, perhaps a nod to the gap
between Granny's pagan Irish Catholic childhood – one of ten kids
in a three-room hovel, sent off at 13 to be a live-in maid – and Nanny's
 
New England factory working family and rumored Twenties as a flapper.
During the day they'd work through the newspaper together, sharing articles
garbled by Granny's habit of reading through the "continued on page 12’s”
 
and into the article below. Nanny'd nod, say "Hmmm," maybe ask a question,
but mostly concentrate on pumping nicotine through her last working ventricle.
Usually I just laughed in the next room, killing my own time with a book,
 
picturing the two nodding heads in agreement: Granny, ever make-up free,
in gray bun, and floral tent dresses, and Nanny with dyed blonde hair, pearls
and red-lipstick-stained Salems. But one day, when Granny said,
 
"They found that Bishop Pike's body ­– wandering the desert in his underwear,"
something snapped. I needed to set things right. He was dead for Christ's sake!
You can't have the last picture of him be in his Fruit of the Looms!
 
I stomped in, all indignant twelve-year-old, grabbed the paper, scanned the article,
summarizing the highlights as I read: "Former Bishop of California… tracing
the steps of Jesus… Judean desert… car stuck... Listen!" I read aloud,
 
"'Police said he'd left clues in his wake: a map… his undershorts… glasses
– to indicate the path he'd taken. Hah!" Their surprised faces looked unconvinced.
"He wasn't wandering in his underwear!" They stared. It wasn't dual dementia ­–
 
more like I was raining on their parade. Granny said, "Oh, Jackie," Nanny added,
"You look just like your father when you're mad." Outside a dog barked,
the sun hung in the afternoon sky, some neighborhood kids played kick the can.
 
I can't say I thought Just give it to them in that moment, but the seed was planted.
I mean, would Bishop Pike really care? I dropped the paper in Granny's lap,
and took the stairs two at a time. In my wake, I heard Granny turn the page.





BLESS ME FATHER

 
At the teen Mass, Father Tom gathered us around him on the altar
and said being Catholic is all about forgiveness, but the Catholic school kids
just smirked and poked each other with elbows. They saw a clear hierarchy
 
– God, the Pope, priests, nuns, them and public school Catholics like me ­— 
that they enforced by tracking the priests at dances or nuns at open gym
and, when the coast was clear, zooming in on our weakness, enforcing order
 
with head locks and nuggies, shoving us into walls, crowing like baboons
or dinging our ears as we huddled in pews before Thursday confession.
The priests were busy in their little rooms and the nuns patrolled the aisles
 
yanking yelping sinners from the church by those same tender ears.
So when Father Tom, trying to be cool with teen Masses, served real wine,
we gulped and gulped. He filled it higher and higher until I realized
 
he had to drink the leftovers and told everyone to sip, leaving a full chalice
that took him three chugs to finish. But when I saw him watery-eyed
and wobbly wiping the cup clean, I waved off the Catholic school boys
 
slapping me on the back as if welcoming me to their club, waved off a ride
from Brian's mom to walk off the guilt and stopped at the bridge over 95,
to watch the cars whoosh, whoosh under me in a rhythm so calming
 
I dreamed of hitching a ride to a distant land where I could believe in forgiveness
until a gear-grinding semi downshifted, shaking the cement beneath my feet.​