The Archangel - a poem instead of an observation.

[I thought a poem would do better than an observation.]

 The Archangel

 (for Joseph Centrone)

I'd known you thirteen years when I arrived

in Brooklyn, to work beside you in the plant.

You had by then become a Legend; and

the word Friend had become titanic, mythic.

More often than I can count I begged the power

of that friendship, when I should have played the employee;

played the employee when I should have been a friend.

Priorities become muddled

     when roles become simultaneous.

That is not to say I lacked in loyalty,

the heart of friendship; it is a mirror

of my own interior monologue and I

never stop talking to myself.

Pronouncements flew between us in battles

of who was right, as delivered editorials

went the way of gossip.

How eager to cry fault and corruption, how eager to commit

     each to memory, or to dust.

In the corner by the lobster crates

under seaweed and beneath Norwegian salmon,

waiting mouths were open.  I found a tag

that read: "Armondo's Brooklyn, before one o'clock."

Your words, crammed from a corner of your life,

fumbling; a mundane shove by then had caught you up;

by then indifference was metal pushed, humor garroted.

I still jump to visions, you toting the fishhook, wielding artistic threats, promises to disrespectful galley men,

while riding on a forklift, like Teddy Roosevelt,

at two o'clock in the morning.

I feel like an ice age has passed,

and my quiet form and shaking hands

remind me of existence.  Now

a fixed bridge stands between comfort 

and the mistake I call the world.

There was a time when my every move,

my every satisfaction had about it

wrong gestations of motive, and prizes

kept their value by their unattainability.

There was a time when simple nods

and handshakes brought us closer,

saw us moving closer; directions

that hope managed like a dowager.

Advice on romance and crises,

solutions taken half in recompense

for fear that if they were true

it would ring of culpability.

Like a mad muse was frailty, subterfuge secretly protected what should be left in silence.

Should I have left it silent, like

the part my conscience never played?

Yet held within the grip 

that some good natures keep are

found moments of cynical serenity.

I can hear them now:

At least yours died for sins.  I killed mine

     for lesser things.

 --Mark Zipoli, 2017