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By Root 488 0

the Gershom garage (lovers of evil midnight made blotches and squirting sounds in the weeds). Across the park, at dirtstreet Sarah Avenue, a fenced-in field, hilly, spruces, birch, lot not for sale, under gigantic New England trees you could look up at night at huge stars through a telescope of leaves. Here the families Rigopoulos, Desjardins and Giroux lived high on the built-up rock, views of the city over back Textile field, high-flats of the dump and the Valley’s immortal void. O gray days in G.J.’s! his mother rocking in her chair, her dark vestments like dresses of old Mexican mothers in tortilla dark interiors of stone–and G.J. glaring out the kitchen window, through the great trees, at the storm, and the city faintly etched all redheap white in the glare behind it, swearing, muttering, “What a gad-damn life a man has to live in this hard rock ass cold world” (over the river gray skies and storms of the future) and his mother who can’t understand English and doesn’t bother with what the boys are saying in afternoon goof hours off school is rocking back and forth with her Greek bible, saying “Thalatta! Thalatta!” (Sea! Sea!)—and in the corner of G.J.’s house I smell the dank gloom of Greeks and shudder to be in the enemy camp–of Thebans, Greeks, Jews, Niggers, Wops, Irishmen, Polocks… G.J. turns his almond eyes at me, like when I first saw him in the yard, turning his almond eyes on me for friendship–I thought Greeks were raving maniacs before.

G.J. my boyhood friend and hero–

10

IT WAS IN Centralville I was born, in Pawtucketville saw Doctor Sax. Across the wide basin to the hill–on Lupine Road, March 1922, at five o’clock in the afternoon of a red-all-over suppertime, as drowsily beers were tapped in Moody and Lakeview saloons and the river rushed with her cargoes of ice over reddened slick rocks, and on the shore the reeds swayed among mattresses and cast-off boots of Time, and lazily pieces of snow dropped plunk from bagging branches of black thorny oily pine in their thaw, and beneath the wet snows of the hillside receiving the sun’s lost rays the melts of winter mixed with roars of Merrimac —I was born. Bloody rooftop. Strange deed. All eyes I came hearing the river’s red; I remember that afternoon, I perceived it through beads hanging in a door and through lace curtains and glass of a universal sad lost redness of mortal damnation … the snow was melting. The snake was coiled in the hill not my heart.

Young Doctor Simpson who later became tragic tall and grayhaired and unloved, snapping his—“I think everything she is going to be alright, Angy,” he said to my mother who’d given birth to her first two, Gerard and Catherine, in a hospital.

“Tank you Doctor Simpson, he’s fat like a tub of butter–mon ti riange …” Golden birds hovered over her and me as she hugged me to her breast; angels and cherubs made a dance, and floated from the ceiling with upsidedown assholes and thick folds of fat, and there was a mist of butterflies, birds, moths and brownnesses hanging dull and stupid over pouting births.

11

ONE GRAY AFTERNOON in Centralville when I was probably 1,2 or 3 years old, I saw in my child self dream-seeing voids a cluttered dark French Canadian shoe repair shop all lost in gray bleak wings infolded on the shelf and clatter of the thing. Later on the porch of Rose Paquette’s tenement (big fat woman friend of my mother’s, with children) I realized the brokendown rainy dream shoeshop was just downstairs … a thing I knew about the block. It was the day I learned to say door in English … door, door, porte, porte–this shoe repair shop is lost in the rain of my first memories and’s connected to the Great Bathrobe Vision.

I’m sitting in my mother’s arms in a brown aura of gloom sent up by her bathrobe–it has cords hanging, like the cords in movies, bellrope for Catherine Empress, but brown, hanging around the bathrobe belt–the bathrobe of the family, I saw it for 15 or 20 years–that people were sick in–old Christmas morning bathrobe with conventional diamonds or squares design, but the brown of the color