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
