The old men of Grand Rapids
still raise their hats to Larry
though their hearts have
been broken many times
since that first time.

Like old sideboard vases
they rattled through
Pearl Harbour and Vietnam.
Were shattered and
put back together.

Now in their dotage,
scarred by epoxy,
held together with strips
of yellowing scotch tape,
with glimpses of clay showing
through deep chips in the pattern,
a repository for odd keys
that outlived their locks,
rubber bands and hard candy,
their hands tremble with arthritis
as they recall the girl who
dealt that first hammer blow
and made that first fracture.
How they each put
on a brave face
and said that her
name didn’t matter.

Now they say that they
can’t remember
what she was called.

In Adelaide, Runaround Sue
recovers from hip replacement surgery;
updates her facebook
while she babysits her grandson;
plans a trip back home to the Bronx;
buys compression stockings
on Amazon Marketplace.

There’s an attic in a
house in Penn Hills, PA
that bears the weight
of a full half century.
A wall of buckled cardboard boxes
with caved-in sides.
A million framed autographs
behind cracked and grimy glass.
Faded ink the colour of tarnished metal.

Sweet little sixteen
turned 70 in April.
Two floors down in the den
she works out to an
Angela Lansbury exercise video.

At Highland Hospital in Oakland
surgeons passed a real live wire
through Bony Moronie’s right ventricle.
Her fingers fumble in the
shallows of a plastic pill tray.
A Golden Wedding in June.
A marriage that outlasted
the apple tree it blossomed under.

Pre-Katrina,
Johnny B Goode goes
back and forth
along Metairie Road
To Charity Hospital
bemoaning the missing ‘E’
from his surname
on his appointment letters.

Post Katrina he tightrope walks
a narrow strip of grass
the length of Bienville Street.

In the San Fernando Mission Cemetery
the Leader of the Pack
has been overtaken,
his flattened marker
a rectangular footprint
absorbed into the
rank and file of the dead
on their orderly march towards
a row of California pine
that screen off the horizon.