Another Effing Dead Dog

Checking a plastic syringe, she asks again
whether I’m ready then does what she does.
She says that she could perform surgery now
then administers a second injection. I want it,
his death, to say we speak loss and that loss

is the first language in which we are fluent.
Go ahead and say it: Another effing dead dog.
But my presence in the room meant everything.
And fast forward to ashes in a Sosa cigar box,
the box traveling to Ohio to sit on a dresser.

They travel well, ashes, though the contents
are not him. The stuffed bear next to the box
is his. And I recall an aura around his gold fur
after he stopped breathing and what had to be
done had been done and I left him on a table

to be handled with reverence, it being Iowa.

Easy Rider

An ache that I was in those days waited in line
so 1969 might tie a red-white-and-blue ribbon

around the adolescent hard-on I was sporting.
My country as first love. Something like that.

I read Dennis Hopper ordered four police bikes;
had each of them painted to stand for Freedom

and giving the raised middle finger to America;
one Old Glory on wheels, one to say that flames

are forever, the trumpet-notes of Harley exhaust
soundtrack for a story of outlaws about to accept

the sword of the fucked world through the heart.
After sitting through the movie, I felt changed—

like one of those police bikes which were later
ripped off, vanished into silver-screen legend.

I’d say it, the film, made me ache for the self
to be thieved from the best of the road ahead

if the road can be right after getting you lost
in the South with long hair and a death wish.

Petrichor

I have two messages I’ve been keeping on my iPhone.
One is my urologist reporting results of a recent biopsy.
In his best upbeat patter, and using words like benign,
he says I don’t have cancer. The other one is my father:
he’s been to a hospital, been given two units of blood.
Says he feels better. Two months before his death,
but he sounds thrilled. And says, Love you much
as if wanting there to be no doubt he means it.

If we know certainty to be a dollop of sun rising
in the east over the Jersey Shore over-55 housing,
then what yellows a neighbor’s windows to the west
is its opposite. Dawn reflected isn’t dawn. Italians
in the Garden State have a word for false: fugazi.
The Urban Dictionary: Get that fugazi ass jersey
outta here that shit ain’t official. That shit look
mad fugazi. And so “fugazi”—“isn’t genuine”—

is echoed light trying to pass for dawn-in-the-east.
My father’s cancer wasn’t fugazi cancer. It was real.
To be certain of something—cancer, what constitutes
genuine, full-on sunrise—is to suppose proof assailing
evidence to the contrary. If you ask me, Is there a God?
I’m certain of this: I was on my knees once in Ohio.
We were down to Not Too Much, my wife and I,
both in our 60s. I knelt, prayed. Wound up

at a Catholic college run by the Sisters of Mercy.
Housed in rooms in—wait for it!—Mercy Hall.
And if you ask why this told me we’re spirits,
I can say I’m driving New Jersey 539 past
the sheltering woods after rain. I can add
I’m playing the two messages, the one
that mercy is time to scent the earth
after rain and learn the word for it.

The Velocity of a Bullet Is Absolute

1

Before my cousin mentioned the puppies, I hadn’t thought
a mother would kill her young, and even after he mentioned it,

the deaths, I preferred to consider his dog to be one of a kind,
an anomaly. How else to account for torn up pup bodies?

It seemed natural, at 10, to blurt out, I’d shoot her.
A boy has nothing to do with contingencies. To him,

an in media res world is serial, undiscovered absolutes.
The solipsism of childhood is well-known. A child grows,

and before he or she does we expect less. Or stop all of that
by offering a loaded .22 pistol, saying, Go ahead. Take charge.

In this, he was like the fathers brothers uncles—mothers—
who walk us to deep water and toss us in, saying, Swim.

I hated him. Hated the heft and weight of the revolver.
Hated the State of Virginia and everyone named Billy.

I hated being told to squeeze, not jerk, the trigger.
He squatted in summer earth by his exhausted dog,

separating her away from the remainder of the litter.
She went, answering some fresh memory of kindness.

He motioned where I should put the round (or rounds).
Stepped back and a little away from the panting dog,

acting as if he had considered and believed I’d shoot.
I can say now, after 50 years, why I hated him then.

Because he took the gun. Before I could act. Raised
the blue-black barrel. Fired. Bent down. Fired again.

2

They lied he didn’t use a Christmas-gift Remington 12-gauge pump
and kept the casket closed. Both parents were the picture of grief—

both Bill and Blanche had to be sedated, both had to be kept away
from Banks & Craft Funeral Home where they took him. Neon

wasn’t dead in those days. You could sit down to a cheeseburger
and fries and a “Co-cola” at Tucker’s Drugstore & Soda Fountain.

You could rent a room at the Bentley Hotel, where Hazel Bentley
would fill you in on news and gossip from as far away as Frankfort.

There was D.V. Bentley’s brick Colonial mansion on Main Street
on the end of town by the A & P, the house Hazel lived in with her

crazy sister, Betty Ellen. You could buy a ticket to the Neon Theater
and watch Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda murdered in Easy Rider.

You could haggle for a good price on a Mercury at Harlow Motors.
Top off the tank at Howard Collier’s Pure Oil. Banks & Craft was

still burying citizens of that much of eastern Kentucky, carting off
the wages of black lung in a Cadillac hearse with hand-painted logo.

Staggeringly drunk miners vanished from Saturday-night streets,
the War on Poverty had come and gone. To this Neon, we brought

Billy Barnett. A dying small town. Some paved streets drenched
in blood-letting and so could receive a body with a stalk of head

and almost no face. He went into the ground in Whitesburg—
on a day when what a man is or isn’t offers little impediment

to diggers on furlough from the mines, their dissatisfied wives,
men who’ll finish work under a sky too immense for memory.

People Who Have Nothing

It’s like they’ve had an epidural to the heart,
those with less than what’s needed, those who
feel that awful ache to set want aside for a while
like someone struggling to speak only good
of the dead who has to search for a word
for selfish, a tactful adjective that shines;
and, in doing that bit of magic, confesses

that love, for any human, takes practice.
When we visited eastern Kentucky, drove
from Ohio to the row houses of our family
who had chosen not to follow the exodus north,
I saw less as the house without a furnace
or serviceable linoleum in the kitchen.
I watched those with nothing make biscuits

of flour and what’s at hand. Tasted
how their occultations melted in the mouth.
In winter, a sorrowful splendor of coal smoke
storied the air above row houses in a town where
no one was christened White and yet the place
was named Whitesburg or mud-shiny Neon
which repaid no radiance. In all weather,

want shuffled to a metal folding table
to fashion a hand-rolled cigarette
and smoke and lean back and laugh—
as if life is good if there’s enough tobacco
and talk of Reds baseball or a Mason jar
delivered from hand to hand to adulterate
most, if not all, of the smaller infelicities.

Family photo of the poet’s father Roy Bentley, Sr., and his uncle Bill Potter courtesy of the author.

Walking Hills

Just over a rise, I glimpse a starred truck windshield,
a beveled dresser-mirror, the reverse lives of the trees.
I’m walking the switchbacks from the ridge and down,
skidding, grabbing at a sassafras branch here and there.
A friend has been sending emails about haunted places
in Parkersburg. I think Ghosts and stare into the mirror
become a slope to a river, the river, the flanking hills.
In this light, apparitions are legion. Flashes of anger
and escape from home, if home is these hollows.

Some days, I could bet myself a fifth of scotch
this much of the earth is God’s country and win,
but today a busted windshield is splendoring into
the unbroken part of itself. I’m rectangular, a casket
with eyes and hair and a mouth—wasn’t it Mark Twain
who said humans make graveyards of the beautiful places?
It starts to rain. I duck inside the ruined truck. The roof
is like correspondence with a friend: not much cover.
Rain becomes the calm and storms and calm again

that is Appalachia: isolating voices, old-old hurts,
and a need to hurt others some carry like a handsel.
I’m told that I’m a threatening presence. Dangerous.
And I’ve been told to lower my voice when speaking
so that bystanders won’t think that I’m about to strike.
But I am about to strike: I begin to bust the windshield
the rest of the way out as I would’ve done years ago
surrounded by big-hearted boys from around here.
Boys who became men who make others nervous.

“All That’s Missing Are the Slamming Doors”

—James Kaplan, Frank: The Voice

By 1950 Ava and Frank fought so frequently it began to affect
Frank’s performances, his voice stressed from hours of yelling.

They’d started checking in to separate suites in the same hotel.
In order to take time outs. Let the adrenaline rush fade a little.

One night, they were at it. Arguing. Ava Gardner complaining
to sister Bappie. About his mobster pals. Frank wasn’t there;

he’d gone back to his room. Ava was using words she adored.
Big words. Saying, “Bappie, he’s cosseted.” The phone rang.

It was Frank: I might as well kill myself. Then the gunshot.
And of course she rushed over. There was a body on a bed.

A gun in the hand of the body, a blue smoke ungarrisoned
from the gun. And Ava Gardner threw herself on the body

and the body rolled over and said, Ava? like she was crazy.
Gunshots—even one gunshot—in the middle of the night

meant David O. Selznick was sent for to handle police,
the newspapers. What are we to make of this? Nothing.

Unless you’re Frank Sinatra and see the nineteen fifties
as a river in flood, all the boats tasked with one rescue.

Newman as Newman

The afternoon Gloria Regalbuto answered Paul Newman’s
question about his race car, a red-white-and-blue 300 ZX,
Number 33, they were at the Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course.

She was a worker at an information desk, Newman was
Newman, and yet she managed, Off the track. Corner 7.
He had a can of Budweiser in his hand. Drank. Aimed

it-would-be-worth-it blue eyes at her. She wasn’t driving.
He was from Cleveland—where she was born, grew up—
and he asked. And she mouthed what a passenger voice

in her Bose headphones told her to say. She was a wife,
kids—a boy (Eoin) and a girl (Erin)—a PhD from OSU.
In this other capacity, she had inspected his underwear,

white Nomex with the red P.L. Newman over one breast.
He was 62. Gray-white at the temples. Thin as memory.
If she ever wanted a story to watch her back like anyone

searching the rear view for a next danger, next triumph,
here was that story: the V-8 blare of Camaros Firebirds
Mustangs Barracudas saying 1987 would be in her ears

for months, Newman finishing 5th (next day) because
a life is an endurance race you never win without
risking everything as you shout Shit! and leap.

Biopsy

Here comes the grim-faced urologist in surgical scrubs,
the bluegreen uniform in the service of the way of all flesh.
When he stops, his speech affixes the confining fit of gravitas
to the subject at hand. He says he doesn’t know anything yet.
No novice, he brushes off a Thank you like a blood spatter.
The guy across from me is in street clothes and drinking
Schweppes Ginger Ale through a bendable drinkstraw.
I recall the IV sedation. What I said to a nurse who
woke me after, saying Roy once and then Roy again:
it was as if I had been in bed with a three-day fever
and it had broken and hers was the first face I’d seen—
I told her that I thought God a woman, a black woman.
And all right with my saying that, she said, You can talk
as if male citizens of the Garden State are always talking
and here’s this one more dumb ass coming out of his fog.
Something to say about the world. His small place in it.
In the lobby of Shore Outpatient Surgicenter I had heard
two Italian men recall the movie Moonstruck, one saying
he never forgot Nicholas Cage telling Cher that most men
are unfaithful in order to cheat death. And so I’m thinking
about that—men, death, lies—when an attendant arrives.
He’s a white goatee his mouth opens and closes within.
Another bearer of anonymous kindness. I recall telling
the RN borrowing the face of God that I meant what
I said to her, even coming awake like that, and I hear
Go through there, urinate, and you can get dressed.
The stream is bloody. I don’t know what to make
of what I let go that scalds the water and the white
bowl red-orange, but it’s spring near the Atlantic
and redbuds stain the frail air on the drive home.

Photo of Erinn Ruth and Gloria Regalbuto Bentley by Roy Bentley.

The Wonder Cupboard

On The Appalachian Soul, an exhibit by REsolve Studios

Small doors of the “Victorian Brain” open to red, lathed handles
on inverted bread-pan drawers. Nothing rises but nostalgia’s one
windup tune. Take old books, journals. Add a message, tiny bottle.

Presto! A shelf full as a trick hat. A box that talks. Scattered letters,
numbers hang. In cursive almost obsolete, a jigsawed word, Home.
Wood paddles recall days when dread beasted teachers’ closets.

A kneeling child fingers a cubbyhole for its marble, its brass bead.
She fondles aquarium stones, wishes for rainbows, forests, peace.
These, the wonders, should fill her life, so she pockets the marble.

From the birdhouse skyline no birds preach. A veteran’s boot,
recycled, is a small lamp base. Search for a way out of coal mines,
radiation in Southern Ohio. Find instead a Lincoln-head penny,

a toy. A plastic guitar pick. From a tree limb to manifold pipes
Illusion fumes onto a screen a future Martian-orange and desolate,
distressed as a photograph grieved by acid. In such a landscape

the single blue chip like a spring sky breathes mirage and hope.
A woman of light floats in a photograph on the wall. Teach them,
the children, to live. There’s wood, light, the guitar pick. Behold!

After a Great Wind

In the too-early darkness, candlelight flickered
our shadows up the stairs. Beneath open windows
we lay bare, sweating between sheets and dreams.

Transformers exploded in fireballs. The storm
peeled roofs like lids of tinned sardines. We lost
homes beneath old oaks and shallow maples.

We wake to a wounded city. Empty refrigerators.
Eat raw. Board up what we must. Make our way
through a jungle-green maze of limb and canopy.

Together we heave lighter branches to the curbs,
toss in twigs. Tree trunks that crushed our cars
we leave for huge machines to grind the wood,

spit sawdust. Cautiously we move, and watch
for the power lines’ fanged bite. After sundown
we lie uneasy, to sleep, day animals in the night.

Dead Man’s Petition

With a last what-the-hell round, a chaser
of self-pity, he drove to Atlanta, Marathon,

parts south. His ex-wife didn’t see him go.
He’d been lost since the factory closed.

And he owed a year’s back child support.
From Ohio, his decades as deadbeat dad

were untraceable under an alias, living
underground in a work-for-cash economy.

Twenty-odd years later, and beseeching
the same county judge who’d declared him

deceased, he remembers those days past.
His ex doesn’t want him alive—can’t afford

to refund the Social Security spent long ago
for their children. Life got away from him,

he says. But he doesn’t account for much.
Doesn’t visit. Defeat transfixes him again.

Then the gavel pounds. The man stands down.
No one buys back time. A heart in purgatory,

he wanders away. The children are grown.
His ex is getting along. She says he’s better

left a citizen of the Republic of the Undead.