Mary Leader
Long ago, I invented a character called Crescenzago, and wrote around him a surrealistic fantasia. Despite revisions, the long poem refused to gel, but the loquacious character lingered. Crescenzago haunted me with his distinctive way of talking. I thought to try a third-person narrative, putting him in relationship to other characters, with their perspectives. Then the poet Donald Platt, a friend and colleague, suggested I try a persona poem with Crescenzago speaking in first-person. Persona poems, driven by a speaker who – although speaking as an ‘I’ – is decidedly not the poet, attract me. I’ve experimented with taking them further, into dramatic monologues, more like performances for the stage. Recently, I ordered from Shearsman Books a copy of The Ring and the Book, opus of Robert Browning, past master of the dramatic monologue.Browning intrigues me: his speakers inadvertently reveal aspects of character and circumstance, so the audience learns more than the speaker intends. This approach makes for a parallax view between what the character says and what the audience understands. It facilitates making acquaintance with human flaws. Someone might be of more interest than first appeared, more complicated, possibly lovable, flaws and all. In the following dramatic monologue – Part One of a longer work – we meet Crescenzago Smith, once an impecunious would-be screenwriter, now a frugal gray-beard, who receives news of the death of an old friend, Yggdrasil Wall, a prosperous member of the bar, who had welcomed Crescenzago, as a guest, in the apartment over her garage, long ago.
Discourse of Palsies
For when the fires and broils of youth are passed . . . then we love to think, not act; the present seems more unsubstantial than the past; then, we seek out gray-beards like ourselves; and hold discourse of palsies, hearses, shrouds, and tombs; appoint our undertakers; our mantles gather round us, like to winding-sheets; and every night lie down to die. Melville
CHAPTER ONE
By the time I hear of it,
I possess a cell. I have
in addition achieved home
ownership, well, cabin-deep-
in-the-wilds-of-Michigan
ownership. Wood-burning stove.
My cell (situated not
on my person, but on my
stove-side-chair side table next
to my readers) pings me up
from a post-prandial snooze
this day, the Twelfth of Never,
or October, whichever
comes last. Texts to me are rare.
Hey, Cres. Up go my hackles.
I can’t abide truncation
of my name, Crescenzago
Smith, thank you very much,
and I don’t like ‘Hey’ for ‘Hi’.
Found this number at my Mom’s.
Hope it still works.
Sorry to tell you this but
she passed away last April.
Cerebral hemorrage (sp?).
So her poor brain finally
gave out. Ona was reading
to her and said she could feel
Mom squeeze her hand every once
in a while. Hope you’re doing
okay. Best, Lem Wall. ‘Demise’?
‘Decease’? I close down my eyes.
I know not what momently
to feel. Well, we neither one,
his mother and I, knew what
to expect then, either. Ah,
the salad days, then didst I
concur when Yggdrasil said
I might as well, between jobs,
spend time working on the six-
figure house she bought with her
divorce settlement. Land-line
life in a toney section
of Indianapolis.
CHAPTER TWO
Yggdrasil P. Wall, Esquire,
was not old enough to be
my mother. As her guest, fair
to say, I may not have worn
time well. But hey, Yggdrasil’s
middle name was Patience. My
middle name is Solitaire.
Evening comes a slant-rhyme near
whereupon I situate
the back of my olden neck
on a slump of leather chair,
hand-me-down from Yggdrasil.
I don’t like the now clichéd
expression ‘back in the day’
yet who just this minute wrote
‘salad days’? The room (or ‘suite’
call it: bath but no kitchen)
wherein I sojourned during
lost time, above Yggdrasil’s
garage situated, had
a low ceiling; a close view
from my supine position.
Hark! What wakes? Ah, I can hear
clearly now. Electrical
garage door grumbling open,
a sound that never varies
a jot. We (Yggdrasil’s new
sleek black car, Yggdrasil’s old
sleek black cat, and I) wait for
the said garage door to klunk
to cessation. The said cat,
full name Paolo Uccello
(which name, by the way, never
sat well with him given that
‘uccello’ is Italian
for ‘bird’), called Cello for short,
is situated under
the said car, both sleek and black,
as mentioned heretofore. Zoom
in on quasi-young actor,
abed, open-eyed, attuned
(that would be me) attending
to the car that vrooms to life,
eases in reverse gear out,
rolling hearse-like-slowly back.
CHAPTER THREE
This time the garage door is
lowering, as I count down
the seconds: 1 boy scout 2
boy scouts 3 boy scouts 4 boy
scouts 5 boy 6 bkunk. I let
out my breath. I will arise and
go now. Unbeknownst to all,
save the cat Cello, the high-
end long sleek black car’s engine
has achieved a slow oil leak.
Not foreshadowing. At no
point does the car catch on fire.
None of the two, then three, drops
of oil is, by Cello, licked.
Nor does Cello ever get
smushed by the car. Without fail,
he scoots out from under it
the minute he hears the sound
(pressurized-sounding squelch of:
rubber-edged utility-
room door) heralding human
arrival: ’tis Yggdrasil,
brief-case flapped and car-key out.
I have dubbed my large over-
the-garage room ‘the garret’.
By the time I achieve full
investiture in work clothes
up to and including shoes,
Yggdrasil achieves the end
of her cul de sac’s shade-trees
from the luxury of which
she heads for the thoroughfare,
Meridian Street, and turns
south, simultaneously
flipping downward her visor
against summer’s southeast sun.
By the time I myself squelch
the utility-room door
into the garage to start
my day helping out around
the yard and the house, Cello
achieves leaping up on to
the garage’s window’s broad
window-sill and inserting
himself into the still-life
‘composed’ thereon, randomly,
in addition artfully,
if you count chance as smart which
I, for one, certainly do.
CHAPTER FOUR
So one vintage screwdriver
(wooden handle covered with
fingermarks of blue-green paint);
pussy-willow wands (bundled
with jute twine, propped up against
the window frame to dry out
and become decorative,
never to achieve the stage
of flowering, let alone
propagation); and a shard
(unfortunate incident)
elegantly retaining
a partial curve of orange-glazed
white-underneath pottery
bowl which, when manufactured
in the 1930s, cost
maybe a nickel or dime.
But by the time Yggdrasil
happened upon the said bowl
in a posh antique shop in
1994, she paid
75 bucks for it.
Whose undisciplined elbow
knocked that gorgeous orange bowl off
the foyer table onto
the terrazzo floor spilling
its dirt and causing to sprawl
the philodendron among
the breakage? Not Yggdrasil’s.
Not Ona’s, her tired daughter.
Not my own, her ne’er-do-well
writer friend referred to by
Ona as Moochenzago.
Not sleek-graced Cello’s, never.
If anyone’s elbow could
break things with impunity
in that house, it was Lem’s, Lem
the Younger, being the son
more or less grown, if not self-
supporting, still the fair-haired
child, in perpetuity.
CHAPTER FIVE
Back to our protagonist
(that would be me, as mentioned
heretofore) t-shirt under
overalls, transitioning
to the oft-said garage. First,
I check the pussy-willows’
dryness by feel. I trouble
not Cello’s nap on the wide
windowsill. Really, it is
almost a shelf. A moth-gray
gray moth rests vertically
on the garage’s moth-gray
drywall. I think not about
my schedule when the Lady
Yggdrasil is at home, but
once she has headed for Court,
I do first-rate work. Inside,
I tick dishwasher, laundry,
cat-litter box, recycling,
trash, general tidying.
The positioning of throw
pillows, to my surprise, turns
out to be something I am
good at and enjoy more than
screenplay-writing. In the yard:
edging, mowing, flower-box
construction, painting, mounting
on L-shaped brackets outside
the kitchen window, pruning,
plucking (whereat I’d dug in
manure) unwanted green shoots,
sprinkling water on wanted
green shoots. Yggdrasil pays for
garden tools, any I think
I can use, and high-end they
are, too, and when we are done
at TLC Nursery,
we swing by Hastings for her
to buy murder mysteries,
and house magazines, and health
magazines. At the counter,
I dare to throw in multi-
colored pens and a large-scale
graph-paper moleskine notebook.
I design brilliant flower
beds. Scarlet zinnias next
to burnt orange zinnias next
to yellow ones but muted,
nearly pastel, to set off
bright yellow magnificence:
coreopsis. Yggdrasil
puts, on fond dreams, the kibosh.
‘I like white, what about all
white? Or, maybe pink. Maybe.’
CHAPTER SIX
One mundane seven a.m.,
Yggdrasil heads off to Court
as per usual: steering
from curvy street to avenue.
Again no foreshadowing.
No wreck. But a split screen, right?
I am engaged wiping down
the granite kitchen counter.
She is engaged consulting
her blind spot, swerving around
a green-and-cream bus stopped at
a green-and-cream bus-stop while,
in the said kitchen, a bowl
(pottery glazed blue with tan-
underneath, circa, oh, say
1890) is engaged
creeping to the counter edge
indecipherably then
falling suicidally
in slow motion toward floor where-
upon it shatters thereby
achieving a reunion
with its erstwhile companion,
the orange-glazed white-underneath
bowl. I entertain the thought
of adding to the still-life
an elegant curved blue shard:
complementary colors,
don’t you see, saturated
shades of them, too, fabulous
with Cello, his beautiful
sleek black. He’s napping, grooming,
looking haughtily down at
the more or less abandoned
screwdriver, looking out wide
across the yard for any
sign of action, touching nose
to a pussy-willow bud.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Close-up 1: the black car’s floor
on the front passenger side
rumbles, littered with junk mail
and real mail, manila file
folders spilled out of red-rope
expandable pockets and
tattered paperback novels
about three generations
of strong women complete with
book-club questions. See also,
road-maps made pre-GPS,
pre-google (the age of print,
the mists of time); newspapers:
the Indianapolis
Star, the Sunday New York Times;
Walgreen’s receipts rich with Cash
Rewards. Close-up 2: I fetch
broom and dustpan, from their nails
in the garage, the first time
I am in there without so
much as a glance at the wands
of pussy-willow drying.
The broom, wielded, smoothly slides
across the white kitchen tiles,
somehow missing one very
small, very small splinter of
ceramic. Or, from another POV,
the said splinter scoots from sight
underneath the cabinet
overhang whereat, days hence,
Yggdrasil, barefooted, steps
on it and ends up needing
six stitches in the nearest
emergency room to which
I drive her in her long sleek
black car, one of the few times
that I am the one behind
the wheel and she is the one
in the front passenger seat,
sulking, actually not
sulking but angry, telling
me where and when to change lanes,
unless she’s watching her foot
bleed like the dickens into
one of her plush-terry bath-
towels and all that paper trash.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Cue the smarmy young actor who
plays Lem. Sometimes, in cahoots,
the two of us go out for
big cheeseburgers with bacon
and mayo notwithstanding
Yggdrasil’s insistence on
saying she’s a vegan, which
she is not. Increasingly,
I dodge those jaunts with Lem who
goes over every detail
of every hare-brained scheme while
saying often, ‘My parents
both make a ton of money.
Why won’t they help me out?’ Cue
Ona, played by a fret-faced
actress with brutal migraines,
a busybody who rules
over the fridge photographs
and to-do lists for mom and
in time for me and luv-ya
notes cornered by cute magnets.
The fact of the matter is
that neither one of them comes
around much, which suits us all.
In summer, the thermostat
achieves seventy degrees
but the garret gets damned hot.
In the drooping foliage
of the sycamore beyond
my upstairs window some bird
who is emitting four notes
in a row emits the said
four notes four hours on end.
Morning is tolerable
but on the hottest weekday
afternoons, I’m ever wont
to take one of my moleskines
or one of her yellow pads
and descend to the living
room, wherein, on ever-new
pages, I write down: I can’t
really write in the living
room. I stay nevertheless
there for a while listening
to the Grandfather Clock tick,
or more like tock, loud as it
did in Donegal wherefrom
Yggdrasil’s forebears didst hail.
CHAPTER NINE
Grandfather’s tock rate can be
discerned and duplicated,
as Yggdrasil demonstrates
when she couch-potatoes on
August afternoons (Court is
in recess) synchronizing
her anxious molar-clicking with
his tocks. I find that my old-
fashioned travel clock, unfurled
into its triangle, lacks
an audible tick. (Maybe
to a dog or to a moth.)
Its numerals nightly glow.
In haze or in clarity
the moon might or might not be
situated (where?) in my
one window. Windows like this
one, being of the attic
kind, are not always able
to provide much of a patch
of sky visibility.
Stuffy gives way to chilly.
The garage windowsill dims.
As for the pussy-willows,
they’ve had it. First they’ve acquired
cobwebs. Then they’ve lost their good
posture. They’ve sprinkled their dry
shrunken constituent parts
to the broad windowsill, hence
to be scooted by hand-edge
(that would be mine) all at once
into the dust-pan, and from
hence into the trash bin’s maw.
Winter adds white to the sky.
Cello takes more of his naps
snuggled against a rolled-up
Persian rug, in old age, rolled
loosely, slung down to the floor
under the garage window
onto cold dirty concrete.
A time, the time, is coming
for the rug. Yggdrasil will
trip on it, stare down at it,
recognizing not one thing
about its colors, about
its appearance, let alone
about authenticity.
CHAPTER TEN
I first become aware of
the slight tremor when shaving.
After a couple of months
of trying left hand versus
right hand and doctoring nicks,
I grow a serious beard.
‘Why?’ Yggdrasil near-howls, ‘Why!?
You don’t have to look scruffy!’
Male pattern baldness does not
run in my family, not
on either side. Yggdrasil
has metamorphosed into
a big-time slammer of doors.
She begins to formulate
her new ‘goal’: ‘relocate’ to
a somewhat smaller house, in,
(of course) the same neighborhood.
The hand-writing’s on the wall.
(Oops, a pun on her surname.)
I will probably be asked
to leave, even though my hair
still achieves that windswept look.
In the event, I am asked
to please leave, not that I split
infinitives, but that is
a direct quote, ‘I’m asking
you to please leave.’ Which does not
mean, she claims, ‘abdicating
her respect for the writer
in you’ (me). In self-defense,
I do achieve plugging in
my Selectric typewriter.
Its small metal letter-globe
rattles off ‘Yjr grsf omrddr op d;;’
instead of what I swear I
typed: ‘The readinesse is all.’
I am ready and then some
to be on my way. Pages
fly off the calendar fast
as the catcher’s-mitt-sized leaves
fly off the sycamore tree
outside my window upstairs
within my contemplation
where I am situated
rolling a marijuana
joint in an E-Z Wider
paper in violation
of the relationship of
guest to host, especially
where, as here, the host maintains
a professional interest
in law-upholding and where,
as here, the guest claims to have
no reliable income.
[to be continued]