I STARE AT MY HAND UNTIL I GO INTO A HYPNOTIC TRANCE
Hypermnesia triggers vivid memories.
Grandma gives me a shiny new penny
which I stick into the gumball machine
at Earl’s candy store, and I retrieve
a winning blue and yellow gumball.
Earl was also my scoutmaster.
His face was full of twitches and tics,
with a hemangioma on his cheek
the shape of the Catskill Creek.
The owner of our only candy store,
he lived with his scoliotic old mother
in a few grungy rooms in the back.
We met every week in a dingy church basement
with a bleeding crucifix on the wall.
Pilgrims from Krakow claim he wept tears of blood.
Earl drilled us like an army sergeant,
barking: “Line up. Left face, right face,
about face, and forward march!”
A master of tying all kinds of knots,
he taught us how to tie a clove-hitch,
sheepshank, sheet bend and bow-line.
He supplied us with bunches of lollipops
and licorice pipes at camping jamborees.
After each meeting, embraced in brotherhood,
he became teary eyed as he led us in Taps:
“Day is done, gone the sun, from the lake from the hills,
from the sky, all is well, safely rest, God is nigh.”
No one could explain why he hung himself
on a lamppost in an alley behind the store
with a perfectly-tied hangman’s noose.