Daniel Donaghy is the author of five poetry collections, most recently “Somerset: Start with the Trouble,” which won the Paterson Prize for Literary Excellence and was a finalist for the Connecticut Book Award; and “Streetfighting,” which was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize. He has received grants from the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism and the Saltonstall Foundation as well as the Christian Hoepfner Award from Southern Humanities Review.
Raised in the Kensington section of Philadelphia, he is a professor of English at Eastern Connecticut State University and poet laureate of Windham County.
— CT Poet Laureate Rennie McQuilkin
I loved the day
you took me to the barbershop
for the first hair cut I remember,
sitting on that board across Saul’s chair
before he pumped me up into
the nicotine-yellow world of men,
taller at last than the jar of black combs
in blue water, the shelf of scissors,
clippers, tonics, creams, the ashtray
his Camel rested on, the straight razor
he’d save for you, the two of us
out alone for a change
the same day we ate
at that Woolworth luncheonette.
Of all I’ve forgotten in my life,
I still see my hot dog and fries and Coke,
your cheeseburger and coffee,
still feel the cold quarters I scooped up
beside your plate thinking you’d dropped them,
handing them to you in the parking lot,
where you laughed (was that the only time
I heard you laugh?) then decided against
going back to explain. The women whose
service we stiffed all those years ago
is gone now as surely as you are
into the cosmos’s endless air. What a day
that was, free of your clenched fists,
your silence, your Pall Mall smoke silhouette
in the dark kitchen or by the front window.
We walked side-by-side to your truck,
the same one you’d load with trash bags
of your clothes and take off while I waved
from the curb, while my mother
called the cops again after….
That’s a story for another day.
Here’s to the rush a boy feels rising
in a barbershop’s throne. Here’s to
his smooth, cool neck after clippers
and baby powder. Here’s to our spot
at the lunch counter, our small talk,
our knees almost touching. Here’s to
your hand on my shoulder
while we walked under what I recall
as a boundless blue sky,
to you calling me your pal,
to one day you were my smiling father
and I was happy, bouncing son.
My Daughter and the Waves of Ocean City, New Jersey
for Eliza
From my spot under our beach umbrella,
I watch my younger daughter tire of shovels
and buckets and sand shapers and sprint,
safe between the lifeguard’s green flags,
toward the waves just ahead of us,
waiting for one to recede before chasing
after it, skipping, squealing
in water she’s known for a week
each summer of her life — and something
in how she flings the sea’s foam
and shimmies under it takes me back
to that fire hydrant on Lehigh Avenue
in Philadelphia, some older kid’s cupped hands
arcing the flow we danced under,
boys shirtless in cut-off shorts,
girls knotting soaked T-shirts at their sides
those shadeless 90 degrees days
while someone’s radio blasted from a stoop
and cars sloshed through a free wash
until a cop’s or fire truck’s sirens
told us to take off, watching from beneath
parked cars or the empty windows
of abandoned houses while a huge wrench
stopped the flow and we dripped
and panted and laughed and cursed
the end of a good time we knew
couldn’t last, just about every face
I bring back from those days gone
from my life for so long now
they could be next to me on this beach
and I wouldn’t recognize them…
and wouldn’t know what to say if I did
about that place of mill shadows
and clacking Els, of all those days
trying to look hard or crazy enough
not to be messed with, all that shouting,
all those fights coming back at odd moments
like this to remind me they’re still here,
somewhere in my head and chest
I can’t explain, and they’re on my hands,
too — in scars, in the aching joints
of broken knuckles and fingers —
which are covered now by my daughter’s
hands as she pulls me back
into late June’s easy breeze
and summer promises, into her rush
of fear and hope while she screams
at the back-to-back waves headed in
to throw her down before I sweep her
up and she takes off again, calling me
to keep up as she smiles and stumbles
and hops toward the next one.
George
We saw him every day, shooting foul shots,
lay ups, jumpers from the key, his tattooed
arms a blur when he dribbled behind his back
or between his thick legs, his headband soaked,
T-shirt yellow with sweat by eight a.m.,
when we passed him on our way to school,
fixing our clip-on ties so we could look
good for Angel, Annie, and Diane.
He mumbled to himself, shouted sometimes,
all of us stopping to hear him call
the last seconds of a game, the set-up
always the same — three seconds left,
his team down one, the right side cleared out
so he could take his guy to the hole,
his thin lips a line of concentration,
head up, shoulders faking one way,
then another, his eyes always clear
so early in the morning, before he loaded trucks
at Strathmann Lumber, before he smoked pot
at lunch and came home to two kids who weren’t his,
before she slapped bills onto the kitchen table,
his rough hands steady, his spin quick
into the lane for a backdoor pass on a pick-and-roll,
his man blocked off, whole world blocked off
while he went strong to the hoop,
unstoppable, rising up to seal another win,
his sweet finger roll one perfect thing he could do.
Our Block’s First Black Couple
Before our family fell into Philly
when we lost the Levittown house,
before I snapped my ankle
when I failed to fly
from an abandoned rooftop
onto used mattresses,
before I watched the descent
of a suicide’s blood
from El train wheels overhead,
fathers of my future friends
nodded over slotted ashtrays
in track-shadowed Tinney’s Bar
exactly how and when
and then, one July night,
no one in the neighborhood
heard or saw anything, not
the basement window’s smash,
not the flock of fat men
running down Albert Street
to a car to the bar to the beers
they’d been sipping
all evening, officer, while
our block’s first black couple
slept through flames.
Streetfighting
When my sister fell into the house crying,
holding her face, I knew even before
she pulled back her hands
what her boyfriend Benny had done.
I ran upstairs to get my sneakers
even though it was nine o’clock
on a school night, almost time for bed,
my mother’d told me minutes before,
my sister’s boyfriend sixteen,
me twelve, wishing I’d paid more attention
to my father’s drunken boxing lessons—
left hand over right, feet shoulder-width apart,
his slippers shuffling around that closet
of a kitchen while I followed him
in slow looping circles — same moves
I made after I raced out the front door
wanting someone to stop me,
mix of who I was and thought I had to be
swirling in my head since he left us
in inner city Philadelphia, where
any day my mother could get mugged,
my sister raped, any day I could get
my ass kicked defending them in a fight,
anger lasting me only long enough
for one good crack to the jaw
before I fell back into myself
and felt the punches rain down,
the kicks, the shots to the stomach
that knocked the wind out of me
like the sight of his truck pulling away,
not once looking into the rear view
before he hit the gas and screeched
beneath the Market-Frankford El,
pain I swallowed until I’d let nothing
hurt us, clenching and unclenching
my fists as I walked toward where
I knew Benny would be, same fists
I flung into my father’s gut
those nights their voices rose,
still feeling the crown of my head
against his ribs, still seeing the glint
of florescent light off his belt buckle
while my mother locked herself
in their bedroom and called him
a crazy drunk, and with all this
I found Benny laughing with his friends,
one leg up on a car fender,
one hand wrapped around a beer can,
with all this I charged at him
and plowed my head into his chest,
swung at his jaw and neck,
seeing not Benny’s but my father’s face,
unmistakable — the bloodshot eyes,
the scar plowing across his forehead —
and I flailed all of my weight at him
as many times as I could, roundhouses,
jabs, hooks, hitting and getting hit,
I’m sure, but not feeling any of it,
our neighbors circled around us,
some cheering, some with crossed arms
while blood flowed from our faces
and hands, sprayed onto houses and cars,
onto our shirts and sneaks and jeans,
before it mixed with the glass-littered ground.
Elegy for My Mother
She most liked couches in sunny rooms,
game shows and soap operas, her dog,
glasses of iced tea sweating on end tables
like candles at a dinner party, or else
calls with news she could tell and retell,
hours on the front stoop watching life
keep happening to everyone but herself.
It should not have surprised us, then,
when she kept silent and hoped
what was wrong would go away.
Or when she became the good patient,
early for appointments, taking her pills
and keeping to her diet, sleeping
in the cleansing chair each Monday,
Wednesday, and Friday morning while
the machine filtered her blood.
Or when she made all of the final plans,
left the paperwork like love letters
on her dresser, which we found after
she couldn’t talk or even breathe
without the other machine that sat
over her right shoulder, that she, on one
good day, didn’t need, and could say
she loved us and they could turn it off,
so they did.
What Cement Is Made of
The cement plant — where all day wind spirals
aggregate around scaffolds and storage
bins tall as steeples — has only three walls,
so it opens to Route 1 like a stage.
Five o’clock: Dump trucks and conveyer belts
stiffen like workers on washroom stools
who stare into their brown or black hands,
or who close their eyes, savoring already
that lager’s cold burn against their throats.
Inside locker doors: pictures of wives, kids,
strippers, stenciled numbers. Crusted cement
on toilet tanks, across the line of sinks.
In shower stalls, concrete mix washes off
like limestone loosened by hard summer rain
under a single, shared fluorescent bulb.
The young supervisor slips off waders
and safety goggles and dreams of softballs
arcing toward the rusted steel of the sun.
Diesel and dust turn to soap and cologne,
the day’s heavy falling to rap music,
phone calls, texts, doors opening and closing.
Tomorrow’s flatbeds glare from loading docks.
Sea gulls stalk the drum-gray air overhead.
Men ease their wasting bodies into jeans,
T-shirts, ball caps. They wait for each other
to pull on clean socks, lace their boots, then rise
together, laughing, toward their evenings.
CT Poet Laureate Rennie McQuilkin selects work for CT Poets Corner by invitation. Poems copyright 2017 by Daniel Donaghy.
