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  BIG HOLLOW ROAD

 

Ages ago with Ted Mark down a dust road

with woods and cows on either side to this  –  

whatever we're calling this now, however we tally:

twenty-first century,  or fifteen years past

 

the single Jewish year I ever noticed

since, growing up under the old Heinz sign,

our teenage midnight prowls got strobed by that

ketchup company's same trademarked number:  57 57.

 

Call it fourteenth century after the Prophet, or two billion plus days Julian,

whatever you call it comes this sudden development of

interest and sewage lines along a stretch of what had been,

if not exactly wild buffalo tracks, at least unpolished enough

 

for a nice roughness and the occasional brute encounter

with some stone or upthrust root. The shadows there were real,

not gobos.  The little gullies we uncovered, far as we knew, unmapped.

All pavement abandoned soon after crossing Fox Hollow,

 

the track turned to a rock path through woods, so out

of the way and unvisited an open field there, a hot day's walk

from anyone else, Sally and I lay for more than an hour

and, being still virgin, made no move

 

nor knew which move I'd rather have made if  I dared.

Ages ago is over now.  It is what it is.  But it's getting to be

what they make it. Item: This young daddy, wrapped in spandex,

comes jogging down the hill, past me, the whole time pushing

 

one of those jogging racer baby buggies.

Then the alarm in his ass goes off. Without missing a beat,

footfall, or least breath, he pulls his cell phone out of his Second Skins

and he greets his wife, as he jogs, as his baby cruises.

 

 

The donors have taken over the dirt path.

They've laid blacktop two lanes wide from the top of the hill

to where the mucky paddocks used to be, the rocky path

in lockdown under their macadam'd sarcophagus.

 

What once was cows is now a swath cleared

and seeded with grass to make a path across the corn rows

for joggers, so that this mid-late September

swerved my typical stroll into time back-asswards

 

towards this new corn hedge of shadows in the afterburn

of the downed sun.  Summer's peak, just on edge

of tipping into winter's hank of fleece.

The inkweed berries tight and thick and taut.

 

I thought that I might find one last strip of perspective

that still looks like earth used to look before

the  Commodere 64 or Jimmy Carter.

Before retro.  Before hetero-normative.

 

Before the bike path or the arboretum this was woods

with a deer path you could barely see the trace of

if you were a rabbit, or if green pyramids tripped

your 3-D glasses into deer-mind mode, at most a disturbance

 

of jewelweed, a certain disposition of the dew or play of light suggesting

grip or paw had touched here where earth could grow so much green,

bursting from the trees, upshot from the bushes, grass gone crazy and uncut

milkweeds launching their Santa Clauses of seed, making the green greener

 

being so weirdly white themselves.  And the fields!  

long snakes of ropes of slips of leaves of wheatgrass and

fescue in rondure of late summer sweetness twisted and bouncing

off each other the patchy light the sun made mirrors of.

 

You could only follow that track by memory now or the habit

of broken boots, your feet taking long forgotten, suddenly instinct, steps

only to find, at the top of the hill, the alumni-funded bunker palace

where blue band sectionals are in full-blown Charles Ives mode,

 

and at the bottom of the hollow a field gone feral with burdock and thistle

that used to be the practice house and burning yard for training firemen.

They firetrucked in from the tiniest boroughs of Pennsylvania

these volunteers who got state credit and a week away from home

 

spraying their day long way at displays of rare chemical fires

and reenacting improbable disasters of substances that, years later,

leaked from their rusted storage barrels turning the bottom of Big Hollow Road

into a Superfund site; so badly polluted, the very earth for its first three inches

 

had to be scraped off and hauled to some dump in Ohio or upstate New York.  

This from the same folks who brought us "The Forrest of Shitty Trees,"

an entire stand of evergreens watered since they were seedlings

with the partially treated flow of Penn State's 40,000 undergraduate asses.  

 

That hilltop of living wood, when you're under it,

exudes a distinct and un-piney air.  A breeze

through these trees hits you like a fart of nature.

To be honest, I wasn't used to breathing much better before I got here.

 

As my personal pronouns show, I am a Pittsburgh product,

like city chicken, chipped ham, and Gertrude Stein except

I didn't escape to Europe two weeks later and, Pittsburgh bred

and Pittsburgh boarded, I spent my infant days

 

with my head tethered more or less atop my right shoulder

which isn't Pittsburgh's fault... almost certainly. 

Breech birth. And the Eisenhower era's answer, surgery

to roto-rooter my collarbone's spaghetti threads of tendon.

 

Wry-necked, I wrenched myself into the world

and spent my first year this lop-sided poopster.

Doctors back then didn't operate on things so small

so they had me wait a year before I was big enough to cut.  

 

Apparently the experience a good one because

my first memory, wordless, coming more felt than

bearing any name, ever afterwards comfort and joy walloped

my gut each time I smelt hospital corridors swabbed in alcohol

 

the way they don't do now but once all used to. The nurses were really nice to me,

I was told, and I must have loved the girlish starched attention.  

Then home with my neck snipped right, except that my head having grown so used

to its first year's habitation, my right ear become such best buds with my shoulder,

 

that never a muscle could move in the other, wrenchward, direction.  

Time  for intervention.  Time for impossible parts to touch...as if you

had been taken by the scrap of  your neck and twisted backwards, forced to mate

the tip of the back of your head to your tailbone, and this repeatedly,

 

and by your father

because this was physical therapy

and Mom couldn't do it –

that was ages one to two for me, a scream.

 

Held in his two hands my broken neck

made to crack in half to break it in.

I still tend to hold it towards right berth

when dissociated or guard down, like a pinecone

 

sat on the hot air register until its warm side

scissored open, freeing its papery seed and making

the cone lop left, forevermore a destroyed Christmas

ornament that got me bashed aged four for the experiment.

 

But having been experimented on so young,

I took to test tubes naturally, playing on the kitchen floor

a chaos of Gerber baby food jars turned upside down

around me making their squashed air pockets race

 

against each other as each surfaced to its bottom,

taking bets on which jarred bubble would last longest

before falling smack up into empty glass,

crashed into the jarring vacancy of its confinement.    

 

See?  Walls are what make us.  Scrape us.  Shaped.  

Welcome to life! This is the shit that hits you.

Between his two rough hands my playdough neck

taught three hundred and sixty degrees of pain.

 

One summer evening lying on the bare strip abutting

the highway that served as our front yard:  Evergreen Road,

that three storey beige brick rental whose back alley had a bar or something

where Kennedy and Nixon signs sat campaigning,

 

we lay at night next to the For Sale sign,

a cold Iron City pounder tucked at Dad's groin.

We lie there together, the five year old and the man,

as he tries to pass on what he knows, shows me his sky:

 

"That zig-zag of stars is called the W-2 Form,

though when I was a kid we called it The Still.

There's Percy, The Liquor Control Board Agent,

with your grandmother's head in his fist.

 

"That one's Walter, The Useless Uncle, and there's

Janet, The Deaf  Niece, Killer of Dogs, leaning over

Serious, The Retriever, who she kills with rat poison.

That's the one we used to call The Zoot Suit:

 

"John The Rich Uncle, who won't lend rent money.

There's The House of Eviction, and that's Draco

The State Hospital, and that blur of stars within it

is your grandmother's mind going nova.  See?"

 

Of flesh, welts and the welling that won't stop

half a century past the belt, the board, the lumber post

broke open across the back   

we must pass over in silence.

 

But he raged, wild maniac

of the screw-strewn garage,

hot-tempered carpenter whose two brats

learned to stay farther away

 

than the length of a swung two-by-four.

Home from the midnight shift working doubles,

fixing the house that fell down around him,

he hammered the rafters that hammered his kids.

 

"See the stars?" he said and I said  "No."

"Look up! What do you see?" and I said  "Nothing."

"That's not nothing.  That's the sky.  I'll

show you nothing.   Close your eyes.  What do you see?"

 

"Cartoons!" I exclaim, the plenitude of color

on the other side of my eyelids exploding.

Wrong answer.  His face goes darker than

the Pittsburgh night, clenches his fist, takes up his beer, and leaves.

 

In my defense, Pittsburgh's sky on a good night was a sheet metal hood

keeping  in the heat and throwing back the fires of steel mills then still burning.

Rooftops lit up all down Evergreen Road with the twisting

traffic and turning lights colliding through alleys and downtown arteries.

 

So a snowball's chance in July any night you saw

more than two or three blanched constellations

elbow their way into the glowering rust of downtown's third shift sky.

It came as something of a surprise when, ages ago

 

with Ted Mark, I first walked north into night

down the hollow of a dark so deep the stars

burned ribbons of light, a patchwork Milky Way

unreal by Pittsburgh standards.  This was sky

 

and deer path and impenetrable woods

and we were not yet twenty and intense.

Virgins burning our bonfires of thought

in an endless autumn forty years ago.

 

Today is what they used to call the equinox

until that started slipping away like everything else.

The fulcrum of the sun. Season of approaching first frost. 

Which, being a college town, means just one thing: sports.

 

Everybody knows Joe Paterno.  Even if you're not into football

it's hard to forget and probably you've seen

the slump of that rumple-coated coach with the coke bottle frames

weathered like God himself on YouTube clips

 

and similarly habituated to silence in explaining his actions.

Item:  his house, a modest low-slung home

you'd never notice twice unless you knew

this unassuming ranch that rises with the rising edge

 

of a sunset park harbors our coach.  Downhill

from JoePa's driveway an idle field's rock outcrop

marks a bike path sloping (shallow and deep)

the edge of woods that tumble to Big Hollow Road.

 

These standing trees are old, the oldest outdating

this country itself.  The lot left unlumbered, even given

three centuries of possible suburban development stalking it.

"It"  slipped past the buzz saw because of the hollow's

 

awkward declivity

and the simple human urge not to mess with shit if you can get away with it.

A clear cut here more work than wood was worth.

The hollow grazed some cows, grew little corn, mostly remained.

 

Old trees rot here now that were seeds before any presently tenured

forestry faculty's forebears ever set foot on any ship to this old world.

Away from their new-fangled Europe they flew to these endless mountains

that rose in a land so old that none of these most recent interlopers knew

 

that earth had ever been like this and, so, called it "New."

Pick up a handful of dirt.   Nothing special.

Clay mostly, and pebbles of chert.  The black that wets your palm

composted from the droppings of rodent and deer left darting away

 

from whatever roadbed or sewerage line got sunk here last.  But

the world is big, and time lies deeper than any possible thought or plot

or Tupperware tub.  This star you see tonight

sent out its light so long ago that

 

this valley was an ocean and these stones

were creatures lulling in a luxury of mud

in the tropical sea shore that we were back then

until Ohio started ramming Africa

 

and the wimpled scarf of the low slung shore wrinkled up

in a range of mountains, high as the Himalayas,

but, being Pennsylvania, got brought down

to their proper level, worn down like the teeth

 

of some old coal miner to root and socket

so ridge and valley withstood.

Bunched up like the blankets of a bed

that two cats played on, or trilobites fled.

 

Walls higher than the Alps shrugged up to take possession

of our eastward sky, while the utterly unimpressed winds worked

their glacial lathes of scratch and buffet over stone clefts

filling our own little hollow with the blown dust of mountains mown down

 

to the level of Delaware, leaving us as upside down as a

baby food jar in our geology. Worn by the never ending take away

of rain and random blizzard and surprisingly wild winds,

this happy valley found itself carved out.

 

And, far as I have been able to figure out, Big Hollow lay

in its same neglected configuration from that day

up to the night when, ages ago, we ran

in bodies skinny and taut as stretched vellum;

 

our arms not butch, but serviceable; our geekish frames,

perched on the outcome of any morning's chance encounter, not built

like Rocky's bluster of bicep but tight wrapped around young lungs that gasped

with every surprise, and the world was surprise. And every moment.

 

Approaching the intersection at Fox Hollow whose

right turn marked the last leg of our run, we saw

the now-ghostly-green-now-white strobe of a dim light

behind the scruffy canopy of pines.

 

Ten years before ET,

ten years after some graduating senior high school class

near Pittsburgh was supposed to have been taken off

by flying saucer the night of their prom

 

to a destination as unclear as the story's provenance,

we raced right at that weird bi-polar light

through midnight corn fields under moonless sky

avoiding boulders that turned out to be shadows,

 

colliding with shadows that turned out to be trees,

stopped just seconds before sheer plummet at the edge of a cliff that yawned

into darkness impossible to measure and thought ourselves

lucky not to have broken our necks; crouching, doglike, at the lip

 

of a unfathomed chasm, in the dark, straining to stare into the throbbing black space

beneath us, screwing our eyes wide open and blind, trying to pierce the bottom

of this unseen hole until one of us dropped a pebble over the edge and "plop"

it dropped a bit and sat there: shiny, undamaged, three inches away

 

at the bottom of the tire track we had taken to be a canyon.

The world refocused and there we were, on all fours, fearful, before

a six inch gully in the path whose trickle of water reflecting the dim light

we thought was a stream spurling across our imagination's canyon.

 

Our canyon was just a ditch in the dark.  Leaping, like puppets,

across these Jeep tracks towards the beckoning lights

to burst out of the woods into a weirder field of troops of lights blinking

in armed multitude, somehow knowing our every move, flashing back in rhythm

 

with our pace. The aliens are communicating!  "Stop!"  one of us suggested.

We did so; and so did the lights, frozen in motion in lines skew and parallel

as our feet sank into something slick like mud.

We found ourselves mucking about in an oil pool on the runway

 

of the local airport our UFO turned out to be the beacon to. 

Surprise!

Our jog home was hilarious and boyish mirth

echoed down the empty darkness that was Big Hollow Road.

 

We're playing the Fighting Sycamores today, a team so lame

they went three seasons straight without a win, whose coach

upon occasion of playing us is quoted saying ,

"We will play as best we can, take our money, and go home."

 

I opt out of the hoopla.

The tailgates of chicken wings and Natty Lite,

roast beef hoagies shaped like Beaver Stadium,

blue-faced children chanting verbs of being:

 

"We are!...."        "...Individuals!"

"We are!...."        "...Individuals!"

"We are!...."        "...Individuals!"

"Thank you."      "You're Welcome."

 

I dodge into the woods at the edge

of this sunset park, fleeing their fanatic solidarity

in search of solitude and space

as silent as the plummet of a chicken hawk through the understory.    But no...

 

the music-theatre kids are belting their little souls out

for the college president and his invited guests at the presidential palace

that sits at the sunrise side of the sun set park before their chartered bus

carts their chartered butts off to warm box seats at the stadium.

 

These deep pocket heavy hitting donors are given

a cabaret of razzle-dazzle gems

danced with jazz-hands glam

in that smile-Louise-keep-smiling-mode of amped insincerity.

 

And all the wood's a stage, like it or not, the president's backyard becomes

a private Broadway theatre on his side and a whole "family friendly" tailgating area

on ours, filling these woods with all the wit and fun

of Barney the Dinosaur on Thin Ice! or Lion King.

 

This place now has a name: Hartley Woods.

It's always trouble when any natural feature becomes a proper noun

or a building becomes someone's last name

or a plot of nature falls to the tortuous logic of its managers.

 

Item: From the same folks who brought us the forest of crappy conifers

comes this earnest Master's thesis in forest redesign.

He marked and cataloged every single living plant in these woods

and crosshatched the brambles with gray Tupperware pans to catch leaves or lice, all data,

 

and made two lists: the Good and the Bad.

The Good ones are the ones he wants to keep, he treats them special, coaxes them, teases.

The Bad ones, honest to God, get torn right out of the ground.

Penn State damned and determined to turn this plot time back-asswards

 

to a replica of some five hundred year old forest.

As if anyone here would have been around to know.

These woods once had no paths.

Honeysuckle, privet, buckthorn and bittersweet; roots and suckers

 

choked off easy passage. Precipitous bluffs

lay hidden behind walls of bramble and cover-up

so only a few ever made it to those cliffs

and, frankly, there wasn't much to be seen, so dense the understory hiding everything.

 

Though the hawks are all for progress, finding

the stripped fields easy pickings,

I miss the  little thicket caves of burning bush where you could duck and hide if you had to.

Insolent, fearful, desolate, and touched.

 

Sally is lost even to the spider-bots of the Alumni Association.

Old trees now fill the field where I, lying by her

a hot day's walk from anyone confessed, "It was here."

my spit turned thick in my mouth.

 

It was just about here, back then, ages ago

the Jeep stopped.

He was young, then, of course. Built like a horse.

And there never was much traffic down Fox Hollow back then. But now

 

above the rise, across the interstate

that had been vacant woods, a gated lane

snakes up the manicured hillside to a fake

Victorian village where the rich can retire

 

when their old suburban dwellings prove too large

to clean, the stairs too steep, the storm windows high and heavy

and impossible to take down now without help

and once or twice some skillet was forgot on the lit stove

 

as absentmindedness begins to slide into an absent mind

and worried children repeat their questions repeat

their questions and repent of letting their parents suffer alone

and so sell the house to make rent for these new digs:

 

two bedrooms, all utilities, and meals

shared with the like minded or absent minded residents

forming a community of the not yet dead in defiance

of Alzheimer's, arthritis, leukemia or weak heart

 

until the inevitable slip in the shower or stroke

moves them to the other side of the hall

where registered nurses take over in carpeted rooms

more comfy than some awkward hospital.

 

They come together here, a strange reversal back

to middle school lunch periods and freshman year assemblies

rooting for the big game on the big screen

where Penn State loses again but the memory

 

of JoePa's past successes fills their chat, just as their checks

fill someone's bank account and Penn State looks good

high on a hill, ages away from those virgins who wandered

pathless in the middle of bum-fuck Pennsylvania.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                          this poem is dedicated to Riverbottum

                                                          and to the survivors