Summer Evenings of 1974 by Malcolm Farley

Does anyone alive remember them, I wonder,
though as soon as I put it this way, I know
I’m overdramatizing, not unlike the fat,
forever-raging, satin-suited clown called Canio
in i Pagliacci we’d seen on PBS that June who took

nearly a year to kill his wife (my father joked) after he sang
an aria about love, the pain of love, and “gelosìa”—
none of which, we felt certain, we’d suffered
during all those weeks of stubborn ruddy dusks
with their after-musk of grilled hamburgers,

hot dogs, and homemade chocolate ice-cream
that my father, my brother, and I took turns churning
with rock salt and big hunks of ice, and then
the fireflies would start to twinkle on the lawn,
and the stars, heavenly copycats, would twinkle too.

“There’s the North Star!” my father would point out,
as he always did, “…and there’s the Big Dipper!”
he’d exclaim, so we could pretend to roll our eyes,
although we found this ritual so anchoring
—his tracing a picture on a scrim of blackness otherwise

floating free of any references, a danger a ship or a boy
could founder on or even vanish in — because
the illusion of safety in this repetition was like
our insistence, when we were younger, that our parents
reprise the same fairytales many times so that Hansel

and Gretel would always outsmart the Witch
or that Little Red Riding Hood could be counted on
to fool the nasty Wolf, disguised as her grandma,
and then stomp home with its head in her gory basket.
All that blood. But wait, I’ve lost my train of thought.

What I wanted to focus on was just the happier things:
the moon, brown bats arriving with the mosquitos,
my mother urging — “Go, go! Play hide and seek!
Get some exercise!” — because she craved
her Virginia Slims and hoped to hide the cigarettes

and smoke we hated so much — which is why we ran off
with cousins or neighborhood kids to secrete
our rapidly molting bodies behind old rhododendrons
or conceal our entire “team” in the unused upper story
of our garage, our hearts full of disdain

for the grownups, trapped with each other
and their glasses of sour red wine or single-malt whiskey —
poisons we’d tasted once after breaking
into the liquor cabinet and sampling what they drank,
fouler than our wildest make-believe — and, worst-of-all,

imprisoned in their endless talk about the past, long before
we’d been born and therefore, ipso facto, as boring
as the fluffy spoonbread my mother would whip up
for us when nostalgia for her own childhood
overcame her gifts as a baker of tart lemon bars

and double-fudge moon pies. And then, to the others’ regret,
around nine-thirty or so, the calls home would start,
oddly my favorite part of the evening because, even then,
I knew in my gut that “death is the mother of beauty,”
not, of course, in those exact words, just that

the end of our play left a bittersweetness on the tongue,
something already to savor in retrospect,
to bottle and stopper a memory now draining away,
and an angel trumpet flower yet to blossom the next night.
Each house or family used their own summons:

Mrs. Sheinblum would ring a bell, and Mrs. Simpkins
would sing out: “Children!” in a long, loopy soprano,
while my mother would just bark: “Malcolm, Martin,
come home right now!” and we’d wince
because our friends liked to ape her threatening tone.

I was always last inside because I’d wait to hear
Mr. K.— whose daughter I harbored a secret crush on —
play his trumpet fanfare (he was a “first chair”
in the Philadelphia Orchestra), so I could feel
the evening was truly over, that even L., with her keen

blue eyes and precocious laugh, had gone home and that
another day had just clicked shut like a music box,
as a good poem or sonata was supposed to do
when it ended, a “rule” my father would reiterate after finishing
Gaspard de la Nuit with a flourish, though the piano

reverberated for a few seconds more before dying away,
and then, from our porch, I’d whisper—“Good night, world!”—
close the door and make a dark, definitive clank.

Currently finishing a book entitled “Dysturbia,” Malcolm Farley has published poems in The New Republic, The Paris Review, and The American Scholar—among other journals.  With an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Columbia, he has also won residencies at MacDowell, The CUNY Writers’ Institute, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.