Tony Trigilio

December 12, 2023

“Four Guys and a Truck” by Tony TrigilioPosted by

Tony Trigilio

FOUR GUYS AND A TRUCK

The rooms were stolen
by four guys who joked
about everything I owned,
talked and shrink-wrapped
my bookshelf at the same time.
I bought them pizza for lunch.
They hulked at the table
without their knees touching,
one pepperoni one plain,
argued about the Bears-Packers
game tomorrow. The mood
was muscular. I watched
the whole time (my excuse:
lower lumbar vertebrae).
The rooms crowded with couches,
mirrors, sconces, the droopy
desert painting I bought
the last year of my marriage—
what looks, lashed in bubble-wrap,
like a very large waffle. Could be
just another boring Saturday.
How they got the desk through
the kitchen. How they wrapped
a mattress. A ladder
in the living room where
my television used to be.

—from Rattle #36, Winter 2011
Tribute to Buddhist Poets

__________

Tony Trigilio: “Within a two-year period, I got divorced, moved twice, and lost two close family members: ‘Four Guys and a Truck’ emerged from the awe and exhaustion of impermanence.” (web)

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October 12, 2019

“Alan Greenspan” by Tony TrigilioPosted by

Tony Trigilio

ALAN GREENSPAN

He’s not comfortable in the button-down shirt,
he’s concentrating too much, as if he just stepped
from a train into the city and hears crickets
for the first time this summer. He gave up
a career as a jazz saxophonist, just as he did a Ph.D.
in economics at Columbia University before
he went to work on Wall Street. Alan Greenspan
always, no matter where or what pose, looks like
a man about to apologize but changes his mind on
the verge and holds a full stop in the throat.
I see him on television, hunchbacked by his own
exuberance, and expect him to wipe his eyes.

The Chairman of the Federal Reserve holds the pink
Financial Times so that you can see the masthead
when he steps out of his limousine with his wife,
NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell. A faint pink
chalk-stripe runs through Greenspan’s boy’s-school
blue button-down shirt. In 1957, when he was 31,
he wrote a letter protesting a New York Times review
of The Fountainhead—he was part of her inner circle,
they called it the Collective, and some thought
she could be in love with him. A member
of the Collective said maybe he was just a good kisser
from all those years as a saxophone player.
“Justice is unrelenting,” he wrote to the Times.
“Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and
rationality achieve joy and fulfillment.”

He appears on 7 televisions at once in my field of vision.
Everyone except Alan Greenspan wears advertising
on their bodies. A dog etched in waves on his forehead,
the stress of interest rates. He raises them in 5/4 time,
the bass lines swerve just so, his song a piece
of key lime pie served on a zig-zag lillypad of deep
cherry sauce. You have to listen to him on all these
televisions. Things are like they are now, like never before.

—from Rattle #25, Summer 2006

__________

Tony Trigilio: “Writing forces me to slow down and really listen. Sometimes this pays off—like when Alan Greenspan, Andrea Mitchell, Ayn Rand, and the New York Times all show up, beaming, in the same poem.” (web)

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December 9, 2008

“Dougie’s Sister Exposes Herself” by Tony TrigilioPosted by

Tony Trigilio

DOUGIE’S SISTER EXPOSES HERSELF

He peed outside his house, in the narrow passage
next to where the Iranian family lived,
because his family’s bathroom was too dirty.
His sister, Marlee, yelled at us to come inside
because their dog, Butchie, died right then,
on his side, next to the coffee table, an incurable
string of yellow spittle from his mouth,
still wet (later we touched it), which made you think
Butchie just needed a breather from chasing rabbits
and would get back up. Marlee walked around
the living room looking for a pack of matches
in nothing but her boyfriend’s work shirt,
twice her size. She scratched her hair as if to start
a fit—that shirt rose and revealed everything,
and I nearly missed it, scared by the common jangle
of her father, the truck driver, wide awake and rasping
down the hall because we played Nazareth too loud.
I knew he had come back from a week on the road
because his cab was parked sideways on their lawn.
How could anyone tell this man his dog just died?
Dougie and I went back outside so he could finish.
My feet raved through clusters of leaves, the truck
tires taller than me, and Dougie stared
at the siding as he pissed against his own house,
angled three-quarters away from me.
I tried to remember Marlee’s shirt ascending again,
slower this time, proud of its sleight-of-hand,
revealing, I thought, a G-clef—not flesh or lips,
but a wayward punctuation mark below the swoosh
of her denim shirt, its pitch beyond me
and what was left in their living room, Penthouses
and ash trays scattered on the glass coffee table top,
some poker chips, Butchie dead, a crusted shot glass,
empty Coke can, a Mott the Hoople album
someone forgot to put back in its sleeve.

—from Rattle #29, Summer 2008

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