for the New Rochelle High Class of '61
 
A crane, in snow showers, drifts above the river
where, this morning, two jet fighters buzzed
 
the flats. I look for other signs of life.
A scrap of blue-green color on the ground
 
turns out to be the wrapper of a half-inch
firecracker. Did Jeffrey—ten next Thursday—
 
set it off? Last fall (as thought steps back)
at our 25th reunion, Molly, now a writer of romances
 
seemed old in flashy make-up and long lashes.
We danced in the 9th grade to Buddy Holly
 
holding close, and once, in nursery school
as I recall, we shed our underpants
 
to have a look. Now 'Muzzy' (John Mazzulo)
is a medical professor, adamantly gay.
 
And most bizarre—John Seaman, our
annual class president, still "a real
 
nice guy", has made himself a star
in porno flicks. But look at me. With hair
 
down to my shoulders, back east from far
Alaska and a poet—I'm one of the exotics
 
of the class. We sat on the grass beside
the whitewashed Tom Paine Cottage—kept
 
as it was by those radical D.A.R.s—and talked
about the ones who weren't there. Steph,
 
my hopeless crush in the third grade,
dead of a brutal tumor these ten years,
 
and Andy Miller, 6-2 white point-guard, who
turned to drugs and dealing, and got blown away.
                                                                                    
I said we'd put on masks: balding, gray,
and wrinkled "monster" versions of ourselves.
 
And now banning that thought, knitting
my brows, I spot a spider netting two
 
spruce bows. What's near at hand grows deeper
in the evening light. Beyond her web
 
the mountains darken under storms. A crescent moon
flies suddenly among the splotchy clouds. The river's
 
mud-green current swells under thinning ice.
                        

The calf I held outweighed me
twenty pounds and kicked like a bitch,
and I could tell by his wide
round eyes as they cut
off his balls—hell, he was only a baby!
 
A potent singe of hair:
when they put the indelible
“S” to his tender buttocks
his body gave forth brute noise.
And love, I thought, might be like this,
 
the scrotal scars and scalded
rump, pains that could make a man
become a voice. “Moo!” the calf cried,
“Moo, Moo!” as it happens my mother's
name that willows in my blood.
 
That night in the spruce-wood
dining hall, the bruise on my shin
turning blue hurt plenty. A bunch
of bravos from the coasts, kids
on a lark, so smart-assed and so horny—
 
clowns, we ate those prairie-oysters fried.