FRAME NARRATIVE

DENNIS BARONE

BLAZEVOX[BOOKS]
Buffalo, New York
Frame Narrative
by Dennis Barone
Copyright © 2018

Published by BlazeVOX [books]

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without

the publisher’s written permission, except for brief quotations in
reviews.

Printed in the United States of America

Interior design and typesetting by Geoffrey Gatza

Cover Art: Kyle Andrew Phillips, Icarus, oil on canvas, 2016.
www.kyleandrewphillips.com

First Edition
ISBN: 978-1-60964-309-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018932948

BlazeVOX [books]
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Kenmore, NY 14217
Editor@blazevox.org

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the sea’s sounds

so frightening
so very much like

my own breath
or some far greater

breathing

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Fairy Tale

Smoke rises gray against a yellow sky

spotted with blue. It is late winter and
ice everywhere, so much so

three kids shiver as they wait for their

thin gruel spiced with eye of a rat, tail of a
squirrel, skin of a snake, that sort of victual

that’ll put hair on the chest of any hog and

that‘ll keep those three fit enough to forget
how they got here and this sad fact --

they aren’t going to go anyplace else.

Yet one dreams of the river and
doesn’t know she’ll die in a different one

seventy-five years later.

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East Lyme

It is a stage set. She sits in her bed

and looks at the window, not through
it. She ponders — everything these days.
She has sat-up but she will not
stand-up. She will not wander from this

tableau. This will be how I remember her.

When I am ill and eighty I will recall that
basket of well-wishes from California cousins,
all of which went unanswered. I will
hold her treasured shell to my ear and

listen for the revelation or the comfort of her

breath and not for the sea, as expected. I am
there. In her room, off to the side weeping.
Between window frame and bed curtains,
her fingers ruffle my hair.

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Simsbury Cemetery

Dennis, whenever
You are ready.
Call for an appointment.

14
Recipe

Norwegians are by nature quiet; often tall and blond haired.

I am none of these things and yet I am Norwegian,
a fact few know. My mother’s parents left Norway for Rose
Hill, Virginia and then moved west to Fort Dodge,
Iowa and west again to San Francisco where they
opened the Cow Palace Diner. Today I meet a friend
every Friday morning for breakfast. We have a list of six
or seven places, all of them in central Connecticut.
He orders omelets. I order pancakes or French toast;
sometimes eggs over easy. And I never say I’m Norwegian:
on that I’m silent.

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Left, Right

When we were between high school and college

we would walk into the hills on occasion and camp.
Whenever I came home from these hikes my father
gave me a quizzical look. Why would anyone campout

on their time-off, he seemed to say. I liked the exercise,

the camaraderie, the quiet of the forest mixed with a safe
sense of adventure and the unknown. After he died,
his children received his military record. Who knew

he had been so many places, seen so many things,

things unspeakable more than splendid. So that might
explain his befuddlement with his son’s hikes
and campouts and his few trips across the decades.

Why should he fly hither and thither when for a year

or so he spent his time jumping out of planes
onto sandy, but shelled, beaches?

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A First Book

On the boat a dear familiar face stopped between stone

steps and a clump of rushes. On the other side of the river,
moonlight and starlight. A beautiful voice interrupted by
laughter and thenceforward all letters for many years
would go to the desert. The sight of their dog did not make
our world an open door. Wonderful things could not
take them both, or the woods, old paneling, doves, burning
oil, clothes, the window, her hat. This setting, this sternness:
each had only these things to remember and could
comment for a minute that the scene would soon close.
I might have known the essential truth:

past, present, idyll, present.

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How It Is

How things are like

other things and how

they are not

Society judges

Imagine Watteau
without a sky

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The House Style

That’s the house style

Flipping through, I could see how

much I didn’t remember

He would chuck, he would,

as much as he could

What happened to Isaac?

That’s the house style

They like a bit of romance

but not so much

It’s hard to call someone a friend

That’s the house style

He would chuck, he would

Washington fiore fiume fuori

A cousin in Oslo?

Not us O Lord
Not us

Flower, river — the house style

Outside he would

And did

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Off One’s Hands

birds and light from right

to left across the indigo
one is authorized to attend to needs
one has both the cause and promise
tenement altars at the side of a stream

thirty-five dead in the bombing

clouds this evening
and the possibility of a rumble of thunder

the Hero hears it — the promise —

joins the cause
after the end the resurrection
after the end the redistribution
the individual repeats when only
the capitalist creates

our Hero stops at a store

all the riches of a wicked world
says goodbye to the horse
witnesses will say the wagon
said dynamite or hot dinner
witnesses will not see
the Hero, only the horse

the Hero had been detained already

once a long time ago and
far away and more recently
here and yet
both times — someone
sometime somewhere . . .

(not the lynching of

but the bombing by)

our Hero
not pearls or trophies
this one has no video,
no loop, no repeat
this one returns

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crosses the river
settles down to make
or repair some damn fine
shoes

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Baedeker

To the north, a bare hill

The sky a mixture of music, food
Vast forests — the beauty not revealing
It was there in every corner

And it will continue in our room

Something good about the paint; our chance, bright
Only in part correct and followed by
Their dark eyes, skin the color of bronze

This is what you do then

Serve up the double portion as we gather
This is what you do then
Three levels of high end luxury, the possible

The house was near, dwarfed by distance

Bound up passions, feuds, the palm
Here lay the meaning, they stayed away
Flies swarmed at the table

Here and there was a house drawing light

White in the sun the walls of bare clay
Narrow barred windows fierce and embarrassed
Other quarters as if bow legs and blank eyes

Gave an effect shapeless and wrinkled

Out of bounds, impersonal, little breathing-space
Everyone knows the hostile workings of the expense
Half-sunk in the ground and continued

Once upon a time the houses were all alike

Every now and then the doors of some
Never failed to hold the same thing
The paper shiny with a promise

Even to speak to their hearts

Is something constantly never (set)
How to talk what is opposed to stars
The great news never came back

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