Storyteller of the Week

Alan Walowitz

 

 

 Alan Walowitz with his mother and his daughter in 2006

Alan Walowitz has been writing poetry for more than 50 years. He has a small part of an MFA in Writing from Goddard College and has an entire degree from Eastern Connecticut State University and several from Queens College of the City University of NY.  He’s studied with poets, Estha Weiner, Fred Marchant, C.K. Williams, Carol Muske, Colette Inez, and Stephen Stepanchev, among others.
 
Alan is a Contributing Editor at Verse-Virtual, an Online Community Journal of Poetry. He is the author of four poetry collections,  “Exactly Like Love,” from Osedax Press, “The Story of the Milkman and Other Poems,” available from Truth Serum Press, “In the Muddle of the Night,” written trans-continentally with poet Betsy Mars from Arroyo Seco Press, and “The Poems of the Air” available from Red Wolf Editions. He taught grades 7 through infinity for 50 odd years. Though old, he says he still has so much to learn. Read more at: http://alanwalowitz.com/

Comments by Editor Sharon Waller Knutson

I fell in love with Alan’s poetry in 2015 when I read his poignant -powerful poem, “The Story of the Milkman,” about Nicholas Lucivero, who was killed by a train at the age of thirty, leaving a pregnant wife and two small children when Alan was just eight years old.  When the milkman’s grandson read the poem on the internet he contacted the New York Times and a reporter interviewed Alan in 2017 and published a story, “Ode to a Milkman Killed 60 Years Ago Soothes His Family.”

The Story of the Milkman

When I was a kid our milkman was killed
right before dawn at a railroad crossing
one low whistle away from where we lived.  
We read about it in the Mirror
and were in awe seeing Nick,
a guy we’d actually met,
right there with the wife and kids he left,
inset with a picture of the wreck.
At bottom, a separate shot,
was the watchman, bleary
and ashamed, being led from the scene.
We grabbed our bikes and tore to the crossing,
but it was mostly cleaned up
except the street was closed
and if you wanted to cross
you had to ride all the way over to Farmers.
We just wanted to look.

Later my father took us there in the car
and made a noise like a train coming through;
I dug my nails in my palms,
and wished Nick were my dad.
That’s how confusing crossings are:
you want the train to come
and kind of hope it won’t.
I can’t even see Nick’s face any more
which I had memorized like a list of spelling words.
Or my father’s which I forgot to study at all.
All I know, the next week
there was another milkman.
Then my father was gone
and I was a father.

What I picture best is that milk box
as if I owned it still
and Nick was going to fill it
with quarts of glistening glass.
Made of galvanized tin,
mottled from the weather,
you could barely make out the name
“Sheffield’s” stenciled in red,  
and on the hottest day of summer
it was so cold inside
you wished you could crawl in and hide
from whatever was confusing you to death
or scaring you sick.

I didn’t meet Alan until March 2018 on Verse-Virtual when he reviewed my poem:

https://www.verse-virtual.org/2018/March/sharon-waller-knutson-2018-march.html

He found my poem “funny” and “just plain fun” and I found his poem “Marriage Song” hilarious, charming and delightful.

Marriage Song

After years huddled together, and some may note, joined at the hip,
you might begin to take after the matted, mangy mutt
whose now grizzled nape you love to stroke as you watch TV,
cuddled beneath the afghan, the two of you, cozy and warm,
 
knowing you’ll never resemble your wife quite the same,
she who refuses your unspoken plea to make herself over in your image:
Let’s sport matching yellow argyles together, perfect for autumn weather—
as you’d walk each other jaunty and proud down the boulevard.
 
Nor will she go willingly to pot after watching your belly grow
far beyond the little love handles that had once been endearing—
and, truth be told, prompted giggles as she tried them out
and got plenty good holding on and yelling yippee ki yay.
 
Though time to time, you do detect in her that cross-eyed stare
you’ve perfected in place of anger, or leave-me-the-hell-alone,
but thank God never that hangdog look you try when you want
food, or sex, or pity, and she looks at you sideways instead and warns:
 
Watch it, Buddy, you’ll end up alone and hungry at the pound.
 
Because we both write dramatic and humorous narrative poems, we support each other’s poetry. 

 It is my pleasure to publish these poems Alan sent me about his father and being a proud father.

Before

I’m 9 and behind the wheel of our green and white ’55 Olds.
I start to check the mirrors,
but my father tells me not to worry
what’s coming from behind--though I know he always does.
The Belt curves around to the right near the Bay Parkway exit
and I see houses and parks and empty lots in the distance
and people walking on Shore Road, dressed for the weather.
What’s missing is the Verrazano up ahead,
that behemoth that looms over everything on land and on the sea
and whose towers you can hardly ever see in the morning fog.
It’s 1958, building it had not yet begun.
Careful, Aloysius, he says to me, though he knows I’m scared
and more apt to wander from my lane unwittingly
than be foolhardy or reckless:
I am my father’s son.
 
This is a game I call Before—
and as the bridge appears in the distance today--
as it always does—maybe I can see it new,
an approximation of the wonder that I’ve lost,
that the years of easy living have worn away.
Imagine seeing it now as if for the first and being stunned
by its grace, its size, its utterness,
the way it swallows up the boats, the streets, the houses,
fathers showing how to sail a boat, to skim a stone;
kids on bikes, their fathers holding on and huffing from behind;
fathers teaching their young how to drive
and secretly pressing an imaginary brake
to slow the car and the press of time;
even a father’s memory of all that came before,
and he never got a chance to tell.

Just Liquor
 
My father preferred a pint in his pocket.
For balance, he said--should the winds buffet
left to right, then back again. The endless chore
of living. He listed across Linden
to pick up the dry cleaning,
after stopping at Just Liquor,
long enough to say hello to McNulty--
or as he walked the dog down Dutch Broadway,
a bat in his hand to hold off a passing stray.
That’s what had become of him,
a little shaky, eyes a bit bulged,
nervous system jangled and misaligned.
This, the world he’d worked so hard to make.
 
After, he checked the usual places
for not-quite-empties --
behind the credenza, in the closet under a hat,
sometimes out back--hidden among the mums.
It was then, he came to me, knocked on my door,
gentle enough, but stumbling still,
said Allie, give me a couple of bucks, will you?
Maybe I’ll take the train to the city
or need a bite for lunch.
I don’t have, I said, shaking.
He raised his fist and gathered me by my scruff
and we both were shaking.
 
Let him look through all my drawers
and unmake my bed.
What I had was in my shoe
and I shook loose and ran.   
I saw him on the boulevard at Just Liquor later,
who knows with what--
thinking, then, and to this day,
maybe I hadn’t done enough,
or maybe someone he’d run into since
had loved him better.

For My Daughter

It all falls so easy on us.
No wonder Jamie squeals in delight
as the red and yellow leaves
tumble early this season,
a time with little worry
and any place a place to play.

It’s late and the joy we know so easy,
might leave with the autumn light.
the way her clothes will need to match,
homework  be done,
and already the least urgent
promise just past or just to come
makes her toss at night.

I've known some tossing of my own
but it's her moan that stab me so,
though fast as I run, she pushes me away
as if she knows
this is her work,
even more than snare a leaf before
it falls from her grasp.

Sometimes in sleep
she says in a voice I recognize too well,
insistent and too much like my own:
"I want to go home,"
as if she knows what we've made here
is only hers for a time,

Even the trees we've planted around
will offer precious little protection
from the places she must go,
as she searches for the home
I dream, in all my tossing,
might not be so far
from any place I am.

“The Story of the Milkman,” and “Before” are from The Story of the Milkman and Other Poems (Truth Serum Press.) “The Story of the Milkman” was originally published in Silver Birch Press, “Marriage Song” in Leannan, “Before” in Melancholy-Hyperbole, and “Just Liquor” in Live Encounters.