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Published by , 2017-08-23 10:23:20

BARBER'S_BOY,2ND ED

BARBER'S_BOY,2ND ED

©MMXVII Phil Boiarski
All Rights Reserved
Published by Fowlpox Press
ISBN: 978-1-927593-60-8



Prologue

My father’s death in 2016, following my mother’s passing the year before,
marked a long journey we had traveled together. Like every human being, I
must go on until I reach my destination. In the months after his funeral, I
gathered together all the unpublished poetry I had written about my
experiences with him. He was a complex and larger-than-life man, whose
creativity and energy is in my genes. He was strong and weak, gentle and
cruel, a great blessing and a great difficulty. We had a tumultuous and strained
relationship that helped forge who I am. He inspired several of my published
poems and was always proud of my poetry, though he pretended not to
understand it. When I published “The Hilarious Beating” in the Paris Review,
he knew he had scarred me, and he sincerely apologized and embraced me,
seeking forgiveness. I loved and forgave him, he had given me life. I could
forgive but I never managed to forget.

The Barber’s Boy

The shop is where they gather to laugh,
they smoke and roar and joke, all men.
Dad’s brought me here while Mom’s gone.
Hair piles up like straw, wheat and chaff,
gold, silver, coal and copper, thick and thin,
strands of corn silk, whiskers of snow.

Talk is mostly games and mysterious looks,
winks I know are about what I do not know
and can not understand about being a man
but this is where men come to speak of bass
and buck and the game that’s in season.

Dad grooms the groom and
they joke of riding the bride,
I blush but dutifully clean up good
and feel a flush of manly pride.
We wink, we know what that means.

The men gather together around
the black and white light of the TV
or the old radio singing of pop flies.
The ball is in the air all day
in a boy’s world of wondrous play.
I’ve learned already how they
pretend that that is all there is,

but gray the hair grows
and though they hack it off, back
it comes, determined as it shows
itself, its bold, unruly fact.

A Child in Time

I

When the world was a funnel
Filled full of sunny days,
I stood at the small end
As the sky spilled,
Blue into my eyes
Like a waterfall of light.

How small earth was then,
A green ball I was an ant on.
I sat for hours in my sandbox
Bulldozing roads and tunnels
For yellow and red trucks.

The cataract of time
Seemed slower than syrup
And the heat of summer
Stilled the breath in my nose.
A taste of dust rose from the fields.

II

Burgeoning adolescent boys,
August humid, sweat and vomit
While coaches shouted and spat
The hate they needed from me.
Every boy must break to make a man.
I could not find the hate within. Dust
Became mud and the mud, ice.

Now, nothing ever leaves me.
I seem to over-think each thought,
Squeezing out images like drops of blood.
The paper fills with dead, black lines
where broken hourglasses read the news.
The world grows more diffuse and my heart,
Cut so many times, has ceased its bleeding.

You never forget how cold
the corpse's forehead felt
on your lips, how hard
and frigid the flesh was,
with no give and
the bony leather
of his empty hand.

He approached the darkness,
like a child
wanting nothing
so much
as to hold my hand.

Cuttings

Ancients believed evil spirits entered
our hair through its ends. So no one
cut their hair until the middle ages,
when barbers bled the masses
and applied their bloody leeches
to cure a dozen plagues.

Healer was a special role they played,
these ministers of the body, groomers
and nickers, cutters and bleeders,
tweakers and trimmers,
surgeons and servants,
doing new things doctors now do.
And, diminished though they are,
may, like doctors, touch our bodies.

The only other remnants of that time
are the poles, red and white,
candy-striped,
signs of bloody and bright
bandages that bind
with hidden meaning
their design.

Alien

As a child,
I would wander off
into the woods for
hours at a time,
disappearing until
I heard my mother
call me in for lunch
or to come home
before dark.

I believed I could
find a certain tree.
Actually, it was not
a tree but, an exact
replica of a tree,
except for one telling
detail. Disguised
to look like a twig
or a branch was,
in reality, a switch
that only I could flip.

If I could find it, the
world would transform.
Instantly, no one could
raise their hand to a child.
No one could take off their belt
and used it as a whip on a child.
Beating a child would be completely
alien and unknown in this world.

Most days would find me
walking in the woods for
hours at a time, a ghost
disappearing until
I heard my mother
call me in for lunch
or to come home
before dark.

Broom of Light

Sweeping clouds of hair,
before the push broom,
gold curls of angels, greasy
black devil locks, short
and dull, long and shiny.
Once in a while a redhead
like a fire in a forest of ashes.

I swept white Einstein’s mane,
though he never seemed
to take the time for a haircut.
I swept the average brunette hair
the bitumen bark and brown.
I swept blond hair of fat,
bald Lotharios with long
comb-overs teased by the wind.

I broomed the frail strands
of dead cancer victims, bristle
of skinheads and soldiers
into the bin, into the trash.

The Casimir Effect

Mirrors covered one
entire wall and hung
in parallel on the other
two half walls which
created an optical
illusion of infinity.

Each mirror
reflected its
reflection past
where one could
never see.

I would place my
face against the
mirror and stare for
hours, trying to see
around
the face
behind
the face,
behind
the face

into a world
where that
other boy was,
the one
who stared me
in the eye,
who stood,
knowingly,
mocking me.

Lilac Vegetal

The smell was funereal, the fat
heady fragrance filled the world
with treacle like lilac in spring,
but thicker, heavier, a closed
overwhelming stink that took
over, a scent, so heady it was
redolent of a closed brief space
in time, the smell of time itself,
an odor of old ladies and caskets,
the intensity of hothouse plants,
a scent containing in its essence
what will at last come to be known
as deep in the bone, an undertone
one only comes to see through
associations, intricate and
delicate in the dangling ganglia
of the forebrain.

Formaldehyde

The joke was on me.
Dad invited his son,
innocent at six, to see
the glass chest where he
kept his silver instruments.

The door was etched with
the word “STERILE” and
inside shining scissors
and pearl-handled straight
razors were arranged on
neat glass shelves. It looked
like nothing so much as
a jewelry box. I had
asked what the powder was
displayed in the silver tray
and my father said
it was formaldehyde.

He said it smelled like
rosewater and lilacs,
and reminded you of
heaven, but that I shouldn’t
open it and smell because
I was just too young, too small,
not old enough at all to know
what heaven smelled like.

He knew, of course, that this
would be the first thing I did
at the first opportunity, so when
the shop was closing, he locked
the door and pretended he had to
pee. He and turned the sign over
to read “CLOSED,” and slipped
out the back to the men’s room.

As soon as he was gone I ran
to the case, clicked the chrome
handle and took in a deep breath,
or the beginning of a deep breath.

My nose instantly closed like a blood clot.
My eyes swelled up and began
to water and an acrid, poisonous
taste coagulated on my tongue,
at the back of my mouth. Dad came
back then, laughing loudly. He had
never really left, but lingered at the
door waiting for the trap to spring.

Gagging, coughing, choking,
tears running down my cheeks,
I reeled and fell to the floor.
He nudged me with his toe.
“You’ll get over it.” he said.
“I’ve smelled it before.
Take a deep breath,
that’s ‘heaven.’”

He shut the glass door,
laugh becoming chuckle,
closed it with a click
and turned out the light.

The Razor Strop

It was genuine cowhide and shone
as if polished by the shoeshine man,
but it was the hard edge of the straight
razor that put a shine on its surface.
The other side was rough canvas
for finishing the sharpened edge.

A razor had been used to cut the leather
into four equal strips, wide as his finger.
It was the latest improvement since he
had broken his old cheap leather belt.
A strop will not break. I would break
before the strop broke, he assured me.

The last time he used it, I was 17.
I took a dozen solid strokes.
My clothing protected me a little
and when he asked me, tiring
from the exertion if, I had
“had enough?” Like a fool,
I said, “What do you think?”

Ire renewed his flaging energy,
and with a vigor I had not felt
from him in years, he brought down
a dozen more, asking each few strokes,
“How about now? How about now?”
Finally, I broke, I said,
“Yes, that’s enough. Enough.”

“I don’t think it is,” he said.
“Not quite.”
Another half a dozen blows
fell as I lay on the floor
prostrate at his feet,
then he staggered
away, exhausted.

The Corpsman & The Jap

You see in those movies about the Pacific,
it’s always Hollywood stars at the front.
A hundred yards back in a surgical tent;
no stars there. They even stopped sending
white guys to gather our wounded. The
Nips would shoot a GI in the leg, not bad
enough to kill him, but bad enough
so he couldn’t crawl, then they’d wait
to kill whoever came to get him.
They were worse than the Germans.

The army sent us all their Mexicans and
Indians and we made them stretcher-bearers.
They were much better at dodging bullets.
After we patched up our boys, we treated Japs.
Once, when I was doing triage on prisoners,
they brought a Jap in with a bullet in his side
and I cut his shirt open to see his wound.

A snapshot fell out, a woman and child,
like everyone’s pictures, it was a little dirty,
yellow and wrinkled from handling, but you
could see right away it was his family,
a wife in a kimono and a little boy.
He was hurt pretty bad but he reached
for it as I picked it up, and whimpered
like an animal. I handed it back to him.
You know, he took my hand, and kissed it.

He Never Talked About the War.

He would answer a question,
but never used many words.
When I pressed him once,
he said he was an NCO,
a Master Sergeant
who ran the Field Hospital.

He said, “I was put in charge of triage.”
I asked what the word meant and he said,
“It is about dividing into threes,
from the French word for three.

“I would examine their wounds
and divide them up in threes.
These were the ones who could
wait to be helped and second,
were the ones who could still
be helped but could not wait,
and lastly, those who could not
be helped. It was the hardest
thing I have ever had to do.”

My father’s voice trailed off
with that small sentence.
I saw his shoulders
sink and his face sag.
and I never asked again.

###

Not a word

He never had to say the whole sentence.
Sometimes, he could just say your name,
or not even look at you but take in his breath
as if to prepare to say your name and then
find the taste of it on his tongue repulsive.

His gaze could pierce walls and when reflected
in a rear view mirror and held for a second too long,
could lead to a beating beside the road, rolling
in the gravel and grass until the flames of
the wildfire that leapt up, were bruises.

He could say more with a grunt or a sniff
than great orators with silver tongues.
The strong and simple statement of his
belt, like a flying serpent biting,
made plain the language of blunt force.

The colors of a bruise are many, first
faint red lines and beneath them vein blue,
then deeper turning into purple and indigo,
then lightening in time to maroon and yellow,
brown and beige until a tan ghost, it fades
from all signs seen by the eye.

Such is the language of discipline,
written on the body with precision.
Not to be confused with hate, or even
anger. He may have, a time or two,
lost his temper and gone too far,
now and again but always
with the best intentions.
Always, he assured us,
out of love.

The Black Man

The little bell rang when
he came to the shop and
every white man inside
turned to glare at him,
daring him to enter.
My father’s eyes
took in the scene,
the men restless
in their seats,
ready to rise up and
the man at the door,
almost ready to run.

“I am just too busy,” Dad said,
“Maybe comeback later.”
It was those last words
that every man’s ear took in,
the sound of “Maybe,”
the certainty of “come back,”
the temporality of “later.”

Several of the men got up
as soon as he left and
never came back.
Several waited
for their haircut
and then left
and never
came back.

Later, the man
came and my father
cut his hair.
For a month
after that
no one came back.

Finally, Bob Blake,
the town Republican, who
owned the hardware store,
came over and got his cut.
In time, many returned
but not for a long time,
not for a very long time.

Autumnal Elegy

I know, they're not the leaves
I saw fall as a child. But I'm
still a little boy sad to see
them letting go; they fill me
with foreboding.

The shade under my soles
has changed. The tree's once
enormous green shadow, now
red as blood, lies in shards at
the foot of its skeleton.

Autumn ages like we do,
a rapid decline at the end,
the bright bravery of display,
followed by the fierce
certainty of all that
rots away.

Pruning

The orderly orchard,
bejeweled by new apples,
begins its inward blossoming,
the color of the flower
becoming the color of
the flesh within.

Rows and columns
like a brigade rooted
against transience,
they stand in perfected
trim, each sucker snipped,
crossed branches cut, an open
airy display of chlorophyll.

Another, less groomed
grove down the road, all
bristled by overgrowth,
fruitless save for a rotted brown
runt or two, buried in a dense
tangle of twigs, obscuring
gnarled graceless limbs.

Absence allows a presence,
a trituration in time’s gears,
as space opens to occupation,
as light enters emptiness.

Barbershop 6 a.m.

Four miles is a long way,
seven thousand steps and more,
before you can unlock the door.

No time to rest, the mess must go.
First the counters, all instruments in place
wiped and put away in the small sanitary case.

Clean all the marble and the big double sink.
Align the bottles of Lucky Tiger and Lilac Vegetal,
new towels, the last step before the chair and the final

sweep of hair, black and white, every shade of
brown and gray and blonde and a smattering of copper red,
all gathered before the bristles of broom, undead.

Hair, like the past, lives on after it is shorn, after it’s cut.
Flesh between the fingers on my father’s hands, pierced by hairs
wore worm holes through his skin like stigmata.

In time for school, flick off the lights, turn the lock, and
run toward the first bell, clippings trail behind me,
thoughts rooting and growing in an ungroomed mind.

Samson’s Barber

Hair is alive after it is cut.
It works its way into the flesh,
worms its way between the webs
of fingers the way a serpent digs a hole.

A barber’s hands are made holy by hair,
webs between the fingers, completely
run through, wounded, infected, healed,
never overgrown or sealing shut, like
an intentional piercing for an earring.

My father would show these off, pushing
a toothpick through the holes like a splinter
though skin without pain, like wire
or stud of an ornament, a kind of
ritual of scarring he came to be proud of.

When his closed shop burnt down, he went
to rest homes to give the sick and dying
a trim, to clean them for a visit, to snip
the brushes growing from their noses.
In dreams, their long-haired corpses
gathered at his chair to be groomed.

He claimed they would come
for him in the end, knock on
the back door of heaven, in payment
for the kindnesses he’s given them.
The angels and saints have a shop
set up for the care of living hair,
which never stops growing,
where souls all come in for a trim
and he will laugh and tell them jokes
while cuttings, glow and turn to snow.


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