Gerald Yelle

Gerald Yelle teaches high school English in Greenfield, MA. Before that he worked for a large corporation. Prior to that, a small one.

Gerald Yelle's Blog: geraldyelle.blogspot.com

Zen and the Art of Living a Lie

The lunchcounter raconteur eulogizing Lally:

his voice is ideal, his punk city brogue: 

“Twenty-five years, breakfast with bookies,

racing forms, circle of friends.  We’d cover

each other’s losses.  Never more than we could

stand to lose.  We were young.  That was it. 

Young for twenty-five. . .  At fifty Lally let it

be known:  No more ponies.  No more booze.  

‘I’ll buy you a beer,’ I said.  ‘I said I’m not

drinking,’ he said.  So now a beer is drinking.  

So now the red flags start waving around:

You don’t leave off friends and fun –His ex

claims not to know what inspired his room at

the Y.  I knock.  ‘Are you writing a book?’   

‘Yeah.  I’m alright.  Just need a rest.’  He won’t

lower the chain.  She hands the pistol through

the crack –Anything to help.  The rest is in

the papers.”  I want to laugh.  Lally left his

family for my sister.  Ran through his money

and tried to borrow ours.  And my sister’s the

one with the gun.  Said he took it the same

way he “borrowed” anything.  She’s lucky it

wasn’t registered.  Cops can’t trace it.  She

didn’t know he was suicidal.  I assume she’s

sorry, though she doesn’t show it.  We’re

a coldblooded lot: We leap into formlessness

then mottle rock with our spit with the rest.

 

---

 

Live Strong Bracelets on Peek-a-Boo Peak

 

Last week the mountain was an unwonted mix of New England

autumn and desert mosaic.  I took the boys up for a better look.  

The summit was cold.  Trails didn’t lead to anything interesting. 

Like a trip on frozen tundra.  At least the man cave would be

warm.  First I had to be alone.  Dry humor and wind did the trick.  

After a lap around the base just to be safe, I bushwhacked to the

entrance:  a thousand feet up a steep north slope.  Once inside,

another long spiral climb until I reached the little room: a tiny hollow  

mountaintop nobody knew about but me.  I could live there, free

of distraction.  At night I’d worry someone would see my flashlight,

but I knew if I was careful I’d be safe  –Tons of rock and dirt

separated me from the surface.  No photon could find the exit.  But

I screwed up.  I never could walk a straight line.  I got lost dragging 

gear in, crawling on all fours through blind-alley tunnels.  Rats’ 

nests scratched my elbows, pebbles tore my knees.  The only thing 

that kept me going was knowing I’d find my way if I kept uphill.  

It was worth every minute.  It was like being in a hyperbaric chamber. 

I had all the energy of a four year old and the wisdom of the ages. 

Then I read something about how cave painters hoped to master 

their prey’s strengths and weaknesses by reproducing and studying 

their images in the flickering light of fire.  It was the last peaceful 

hour I’d know.  My vision failed from drawing caterpillars and 

ichneumon wasps by torchlight.  Ichneumons with human heads 

and hands on their abdomens appeared on the ceiling.  More stung 

through caterpillar fur on the north wall, laying eggs under cater-

pillar skin east and west while hatchlings devoured their unsuspecting 

hosts on the southern escarpment.  Trouble is I got sick imagining 

eggs under the skin.  Shouldn’t I warn the kids?  This is no way to 

build a family.  Putting eggs in innocent species: a parent’s worst

nightmare.  It ruined my elevation.  I’m used to moving in circles 

of doctors and lawyers –even schizophrenics sweeping downtown 

sidewalks are so dependent on up being the direction of the blockage 

they can’t resist the urge to push forward.  We push with husks of 

dead insects, dry remnants of bird wings, egg-shells, horsehair, web

-like substances so moldy they cure yellow jaundice and emphysema 

–threads spun by ancient spiders, not by arachnids living today.

---

Alecto

 

Your doves would fold their wings like prim-

rose when we met.  You knew their flapping

scared me.  I knew the moment I saw you

slip from your dayspring, wrap summer’s mist

in gauze and cure the cattle of their cold that

I would have to snub my sponsor, the makers

of “PIZZAZZ,” where my position is hard to

gauge, and I feel I’m getting even, even as I feel

I can’t go on.  I told you they accused me of

spoiling the indigo, but you know their hands

were in it.  They don’t give you time to think

about contingencies.  All of which is wrapped in  

muddled dregs and bitter resentment.  I only

bring it up having had it out with a prophet

whose Voice Like His Master the Rain has set

him on your shining path.  He said he knows

you better than I could ever hope to.  He says

I should forget you, feed my kids and fill my

void on militating charity.  I won’t leave you in

the company of priests.  I’d be less than loss

of faith would leave me.  I dwell on you in the

arms of my wife.  I keep our rapprochement:

my family small, I keep away from your sisters,

applaud your vagaries.  You string me along.

 

---

 

Old Colony, Little Canada

 

Because nature, in some of its putting together and

taking apart, suggests cures the body’s turned to

since giving up believing in the self-effecting cause,

I head for Cathedral Oak, an hour and a half before

the end of my shift, soaking up the smells of early

morning, an hour, at least, before daylight.  And the

oak is alive, and I touch it, as we touched them in

the park ages ago as children where oaks were shaggy

cousins of our elders, dwarfed by the Battleship and

Germanium blocks where mothers and fathers were

maple, their mothers and the Beaudrys, the Tanguays

and Greenoughs, laughing on Sundays on shade-dappled

benches, while children ran laps around tulips and

boles whose knobby kneed roots could hardly slow us,

but stopped us with their curious skin, the black bark

of unbowed age.  The Parks Department was planting

saplings my first birthday.  My mother raised me to

think one was mine, visible from a living room win-

dow, given me in stewardship, my share of municipal

identity.  A length of string held it steady to a stake. 

It was small and hardly grew at all in our first 12 years.  

When we hit out teens it filled out.  By then my folks

had moved us to the Highlands and I only saw it on rare

occasions,  Throughout the 70’s and 80’s the city

changed around it.  Finally, everything else was gone:

trees, buildings, flower beds, benches.  It looked mature

in its solitude.  As for me, I’ve staked myself to slash

burn economies, the kind that favor quick growth over

the slow persistence of trees.  I wouldn’t know the

child I was if he tapped me on the shoulder.  A maple

on a traffic isle on a paved-over park:  Who knows

what lasts.  What I have is this live oak canopy, miles

uptown, all night crying me out to the wild.

 

---

 

Pre-Cicada Summer Night

 

That insect or bird sounds unsure –it has no idea

what it is, and it’s asking –as if I would know.

Parts of the house are off limits due an infestation

of crab-like fog –the same sort of dangerous

gift-bearing penumbra as closed down the swamp 

forty years ago, going at a steady clip.  Precious

little else to tell.  Suddenly footsteps, suddenly

dogs.  Me: going to the bathroom.  All the lights

are on.  Being modest, not reserved.  Now’s the

time, if ever there was any.  The foot sounds. 

The hissing of tires on Grantwood.  Whatever

night thing was chirping half an hour ago stopped. 

Rain falls from the trees into which it fell earlier. 

The phone rings.  My father, calling from his

ward.  He isn’t talking; knowledge of who it is

is only tentative.  Who else could it be?  With his

breathing.  He wants to know how long he has

to go on.  He was always so robust, so ready for

anything.  A shoelace, an eyelash, a stamp and some

water –a catalog of endless productivity painstakingly

assembled for his children’s perusal.  How much

of it would we want to possess?  It’s not a question

of money.  It’s a question of where to put it. 

At some point he stopped accumulating details

yet the shelves in his house remain full.  One could

carbon date the evidence to nail down the age at

which he no longer saw the point, but that would

prove nothing.  I always knew we’d have to

say goodbye.  This silence supposed to be golden.

 

---

 

Trade’s Immortal Memorial

 

My last tooth crumbling like the South Twin Tower

came as no surprise.  I’d long put shock and awe

behind me.  Ground molars to stumps in my sleep. 

Others I swallowed with ice.  Once while castling my

king –I was learning a new gambit –I bit a Chicken

MacDough, not paying attention to whether there

were bones.  I’d never heard of MacDough having

bones.  It happened in the context of teeth that hadn’t

fallen out in over a month so I did have some hope

for a lawsuit.  Rain made up for lost time by becoming

its own catalyst.  Which is a way of saying it fell

from a long way off.  It fell in the context of failing

to follow a basic rule: I was learning how to move

the Queen but the person I was playing kept pre-

tending he was driving with a phone stuck between

his tongue and his thumb.  Did I bite down hard on

anger?  Was I ever as young as I felt?  Maybe it

wasn’t my last tooth.  Maybe another set will work its

way through to be longer and sharper, whiter and

mightier than any that cracked under pressure before. 

Maybe I won’t think about getting old.  Maybe it

won’t happen.  All my former enemies are extinct.