Mafia Myth
In the town there are townspeople
There is night and there is day
This is never not the case
There can be a bakery in the town
And a dry cleaner and a mayor’s office,
and a car wash
It’s up to you
It’s your town
You could be a mother You could
be a son You could be
principal of a junior high school
You get the gist. Pistol cocked
a vigilante hunches
in a crowd The medic sutures
whichever wound next needs tending
Remember there is light
and there is darkness. Every night
the townspeople
are cut down in their houses
or in the street But who
has time to mourn the dead
during daylight hours
even if you are a mother
Life goes on. There are decisions to make
the suspicious to put away.
No one wants the job
but there has to be a cop
in the town. There
is good town
and there is bad town
and the rules say only
the cop can tell which from which
which is never not the case.
[Note: Mafia is a party game created by Dmitry Davidoff in 1986 modeling the conflict between the informed minority (mafia) and uninformed majority (town, or innocents).]
* * * * *
Midlife Aubade
There’s a certain comfort
in knowing a bridge has stood
almost forever. There
long before the dawn’s first
foghorn blast — like one beast
lowing to another —
and before each ship I could describe now
with painstaking precision
that will glide slowly
underneath. Steel. Suspension wire.
Something in my life
should compare to these … Once
there was a bridge whose name
I never learned, under which
a small stream shimmered
the way a pond sometimes shimmers
for a moment, when a child flips a coin into it.
Tiny fish swam there. But the water
was like smoke. I thought,
nothing should have to live like this.