Downtown Revival: Poems 1994-1997

By Thomas Porky McDonald

The second collection of poetry to be released by Thomas Porky McDonald, Downtown Revival: Poems 1994-1997, covers the poets most focused and (arguably) prolific period. Written directly after returning to Downtown Brooklyn following a protracted suspension from work, Homestand opens this collection with a number of personal pieces. For Ever Friends, All These Eternities and Single Santa Fe Car, as well as the title piece, show the poets appreciation for both the concept and the reality of home. McDonald continues in this vein in Trolley Tracks, another collection that speaks to the inner soul of the man. She Smiles For You Ever, Once Upon a Time on a Platform and As the Pink Grayer Grays live in reflective glances that are obviously revered by the poet.

Ramble Poets, which McDonald himself considers his most structured and polished book of poems, goes back to the ballpark, in a way that is reminiscent of his first two poem books, Secondto Verse and Eternal Postcards. Along with baseball pieces like Safe Harbor and September Rain, Ramble Poets also contains a long list of thought-provoking verses, most notably Cross on the Red, When the Day Comes and Bleary-eyed Milkmen.

The final two books that appear in Downtown Revival are Gravy Man and Universal Loner, which appear semi-autobiographical in nature. Gravy Man, in many ways as reflective as Ramble Poets, features some nostalgic material, like Time Induced Lies, Hey Jack Ruby, P.S. 6 is a Parking Lot and Sunnyside Gardens. The tender Waltz Into the Night closes out this book and leads to Universal Loner, which could well be entitled The Sad Poems. The title piece, along with Scenes of This Earth, All Ashor

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Oct 19, 2004
• ISBN: 9781468517231

Thomas Porky McDonald

Michelle Le Chen was 7 years old when her father was incarcerated in 1975. Her mother spent the next 17 years working for her husband’s escape or release. The rest of Michelle’s family escaped from Vietnam in 1979-80, with most of them settling in Virginia, where she would live for the next 25 years, before moving to Florida in 2014.

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Contents

Introduction

BOOK SIX Homestand

1) Beckoned Back

For Ever Friends

Heroes on the Front Porch

Dated on Arrival

Wailing Point

Yesterdays I Never Knew

All the Kind, Cool Catholics

From a Fine, Dusty Folder

Painful Necessities

Three Not Needed, Hopefully

Ringless Broken Fingers

That Child

Breathless Year, Christmas Night

Just Want to Say Thank You

Put on Some Chuck Berry

Dreaming in Expresso

Ever is the Night

Back to the Beginning

A Case of Mirrors

Wet-Haired Morning Prayer

Final Masterpieces

Homestand

2) Drifting Forward

All These Eternities

Unassuming Immortals

Footsteps to Infinity

Popular Myths, Over Easy

A Conscious Place

Happy Were You’re At

Consider the Miracle

So Much Magic

Angry Saints

Moments in the Sun

The Table

Running From Nothing

Nineties Noel

Single Santa Fe Car

Love Holds the Door

Days and the City

A Jelly Roll Walk

Alcatraz on the Home Front

Transcend

I Don’t Sing in the Choir

On the Trail of Duluoz

3) Always There

Returning Vets

A Single Classic Swing

F Words

Behind Curt

The Shibe City Mashers

A Final Day at Lehigh

Dear Mrs. Manley

Weathered Brick

A Pryor Message

Runaway Drifter

Those Planes Are Screaming

Weeknights in Blue

Gray Crossover Time

Never These Men

Feelings of Hope

Bus Driver 52

A Most Welcome Rash

An Unlikely Stab

Two Hands Unique

Young Joan Forever

Yours Eternally

My Goddaughter

BOOK SEVEN Trolley Tracks

One For the Ladies

She Smiles For You Ever

1) Historical

Trolley Tracks

Moments in Hollow Redundancy

Adrift in Literery Irony

Integrity of Odessa

Modern Day Regulators

Should the Altruists Storm Wall Street

Manhattan Me

Memoirs of Ulysses

Little Bobby’s Visit

Our Girl Nancy

A Little Immortality

The Clock in the Picture Show

Salvation Innocents

Danger at Your Doorstep

Thirty Years and Thirty Nights (Adding Three)

Time Enough to Fly

Once Upon a Time on a Platform

Ditmas to Ditmars

Poor the Scribbler

All the Way Back

Journey Boy

2) Reflectional

An Astoria Night

What it is You Know

Young Boy Beard

Grasping Inner Peace

Limerick, ‘Ome and ‘Im

Marchin’ to Another Place

Why Do I Cry?

Someone to Look Forward To

Genus Understood

Born in a Moment

Oh, Be Joyful

The Night Bird Lady Brooks

Life’s Basic Gift

Charmed By the Ages

Outlaw Shadows

Wrestling Adoption

Deep, Dark Mister Nightly

Dream For Now

An Hour of Joy

As the Pink Grayer Grays

Dead-eye to the Dawns

3) Inspirational

Simply There

The Greatest Room in the World

Five Hours to the Answer

Minding Heroes

As John L. Graduate

They Should Be Sorry, Hilda

Dem, I and Eden

Horseshoes on My Mind

Return of the Midnight Ghost

Grandstand Child

Friday’s Run

If You Should Rise on Tuesday

Conversation With a Manager

The Mikeman’s Gone Fishing

Another Homer

Well Removed From Coogan’s

Watching the Same Sandlot Roar

Legendary Truly

Calling Mickey

Schoolyards Beyond Mind and Majors

One Most Special

Shelynda

BOOK EIGHT Ramble Poets

A Word on Survivors

Sonic Whispers

1) Ramble Poets

Ramble Poets

Cross on the Red

Members in My Soul

Can You See Yourself in Amsterdam?

Everyday Could Be Skyrockets

Drums of Awareness

Song on the Long

The Next Level

Wounded Bows and Shattered Ties

Smiling Dead Conformists

Character Actor Twins

Enchanted By the Darkness

Duly Impressed Upon Waking

A Lot in the Sun

Ten Forty-five

Channels of October

Repetition Dreamstreet

For Seconds

Hills of After

Oh, December

(It Would Be) So Easy

An Enlightened Age

Searching For Sam

Chief’s View 59

2) Frozen Shadows

Safe Harbor

September Rain

And Reiser Was Right

Blue Hats With a B

Lonesome Warrior

More Bad News in Flatbush

Chasing Rickey

A Forty-Year Rally

The Restless Time of Year

Only Angels Can Explain

A Ballgame, Again

Heaven Again

Rockin’ By the Lakeside

Reigning Echoes

Say King Kelly

Norworth’s Anthem

Grown Men Wept

What Could I Say to Henry?

To Roam the Hollow

Should Fall Come Easy

An Old Weathered Tree

A Church I Never Went To

Why They Live

Able to Find Cleon

Frozen Shadows

3) Diverse Angels

Diverse Angels

Just Five Minutes

A Solitary Figure

Passing Maria

Smiling Explosion

Don’t You Ever Cry

That Rival Shirt

Along About Fairmount

On the Occasion of My Youth

When the Day Comes

Thinking of Your Time Together

One Picture

The 41 Dancer’s Exit

Her Name’s Not Enola Gay

Comings of Age

Mellowed Horsemen

Bleary-eyed Milkmen

A Lost Receipt

Frames

Epic Volumes

A Swan in Queens

BOOK NINE Gravy Man

1) Secret Recipe

Time Induced Lies

Midnight Marys

Acceptable Panic

Long Ago Valentines

The Thing About Coffeyville

We Have Won Before

Falling Planes

Wild Are Photographs

Cunning Apparition

Hey, Jack Ruby

I Pictured a Wave

The Loot in Question

A Screen For You

Time to Wake Up

P.S. 6 is a Parking Lot

In a House Far Away

Churches on Fire

Take a Glimpse

Vaudeville’s Final Act

Atomic Ellwood

Headfirst To Insanity

2) Main Course

Gravy Man

Precious India

A Carol of Joy

Rings of Awareness

Workin’ Without a Net

In My Museum

The Lone Seeker’s Lark

Strangers Who Left

Quiet Streets

My Pride and My Tragedy

How Inadequate Are Words

Exploring the Dark Side

On the Outer Skirts of May

Well Beyond the Palm

Slowed By the Immediacy of the Moment

A Gentler Wind

God was Working Overtime

A Jack Dorney Pose

Numb Pinky

Sunnyside Gardens

3) Peanuts & Crackerjack

Lofty Generations

Run Forever, Jesse

Young Men Raised on Theories

Two Men on the Lam

Rainbows in Need of a Storm

On the Yard

Birthdays of Winter

Yannigan Skies

Baseball Dream 500

As Alex is Facing Lazzeri

Brilliant are Some

Leading Off

Across Dimensions

San Diego’s Pride

The Space of Texas Leaguers

Paying for Fred

The Night We Couldn’t Get Home

Somewhere in the Flushing Mist

Very Fall Classics

The Turning of the Seasons

Forever in My Heart

Angelic Calls

46th Street

Just Desserts

Waltz Into the Night

BOOK TEN Universal Loner

From Whence it Came

In Some Ways, He Was a Tall Tale

1) Wired Dreamer

Scenes of This Earth

Seldom Promises

Morning Matinee

The Legend of Steve Royal

Dungeons I Delve

Vertigo is Relative

Obscure the Inevitable

Ira’s Theme

From Spring to Fall

Nightmare Chronicles

Chasing .400 in a .250 World

The Ticket Scam

Anarchy at Daybreak

The Man With the Accent

Call Me –Hmm- Amelia Earhart

Pride in Ourselves

3B

Rapid Sublime

All Ashore

(2) Crowd Pleaser

Archie, Red and the Kid

Miss Troubadour

Hurlers, Were Three

Hughie’s Folly

There in It’s Majesty

Two City Boys

A Ballpark in February

Neither Mack nor McGraw

Truly an Elevated Line

A Lifetime to Ponder

Brothers of the Heart

Details Lost To History

On Hallowed Ground

An Annual Dose of Pride

Buck Was a Man

Six From All Ways

What Else Went Down

Damn the Achilles

The Fan

A Brushback of Concern

Jack’s Day

The Place That I’ve Gone All the While

I Never Went to the Polo Grounds

I’ll See You in Your Winters

Centerfield is Calling

3) Universal Loner

Universal Loner

An Alternate Way

8969

Sober Years of Solemn Innocence

Little Tragedies

Lost Explorer

Excuse Me, Mr. Ismay

Survivor’s Tale

Ellis Mine Aubade

Leap From the Sky

A Flesh and Blood Flight

Another

In Just a Line

Pray For the Lady

The Unknowns of My Soul

Sleeping in the Park

Random Ecstasy

The Saga of True Friends

And on It Goes

Until the Next Remember

About the Author

This collection is dedicated to:

Dan Heidt

&

Bob Otero

Two fair and decent men who were instrumental in the revival.

Introduction

Following a six-month hiatus from the workforce, precipitated by an arrest, suspension and positive drug screening, the time had come to reclaim whatever it was that was mine. Whether it was just circumstance or Divine intervention I can’t say, but by the purest of luck, my fourth and fifth poem books, written from March to October 1994, were to become the final pieces to my first poetry collection. Ground Pork, Poems 1989-1994, contained my first five books of poetry, including the noteworthy numbers four and five, Fugitive in Your Face and Out Here in…..Crazyland. That pair of conclusive volumes is significant, when you consider the turbulence that coincided with the writing of each. What was to follow, not so surprisingly, was a new beginning.

Downtown Revival, Poems 1994-1997 begins with a most personally moving collection that I called Homestand. Written from November of 1994 into early 1995, Homestand contains a number of pieces that speak of renewal, rebirth and any number of other emotions that might well contain re- as a prefix. In retrospect, there was also a need to look back at things and places from my earlier days that shaped who I was to become. I slowly found that poems about life and the human condition would overtake, in numbers, my signature baseball pieces. Of course, the Grand Old Game would remain a paramount topic in my verses, though not as much as it had in the first few collections.

The opening poem of this collection, For Ever Friends, could have been about any of a number of wonderful friends that I’d been fortunate enough to encounter and grow close to over the years, though it was written with one particular in mind. I met Monah T, Johnson early in my career at New York City Transit (about 1986), and she has become one of the great friends of my life. For Ever Friends, written distinctly for her, is nonetheless one of the more universal pieces I’ve ever composed. It also told me that I was back, as it were, after some turmoil in my personal life. Homestand also contains personal pleas for appreciation of one’s fortunate place in life (Happy Where You’re At), as well as how we as people might make things better for all (I Don’t Sing in the Choir). It is interesting to note (for me, anyway) that as I delved more consciously into the human condition, I found that my baseball pieces also got consistently more personal and reflective.

In A Most Welcome Rash, I tell of what it was like growing up in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, when the game of baseball was an incredibly vibrant part of my life, as it doubtless was for so many others. In a personal nod to that time and its place in history, I wrote A Single Classic Swing, which recalls the quintessential event of the day, Hank Aaron’s 715th home run. All in all, the book Homestand, including the title piece, which celebrates the simple act of going to an 8-year olds birthday party, is a grateful hymn to returning home. That party, for Jessica Brady, the daughter of my lifelong friends, Chris and Frank, represented a moment when I felt that all the bad was behind me, and that only positive could follow. For the most part, that has been true, so this volume might well be the Brady’s book, since being with Jessica, just like being with her parents, Chris and Frank, has always been like coming home again.

Fresh off the heels of Homestand, came the wistfully named Trolley Tracks, which began as a single piece about the tracks that still stuck out of the ground at the corner of Smith and Schermerhorn Streets in Brooklyn in the early 1990’s. They have since been removed and the street re-paved, which I guess dates the poem Trolley Tracks, though I like to think that the entire volume, under the heading Trolley Tracks, remains timeless. As in Homestand, there are longing pieces (As the Pink Grayer Grays, Dead-Eye to the Dawns) and moments where I simply question the world around me.

Back in 1991, I took a trip to Disney World in Florida, joined by my Auntie Ann and her youngest child, my cousin Jessica (another Jessica). The occasion was my 30th birthday, which was on February 28. A few days after a most wonderful week that I will always be indebted to my aunt and youngest cousin for, I toured a few Major League Spring Training camps with my cousin Dawn (Jessica’s older sister) and her infant son, Jonathan. In a whirlwind day that I will always look upon fondly, we went from Dodgertown in Vero Beach to the New York Mets’ Port St. Lucie home and back to West Palm Beach, where Dawn, Jessica, Auntie Ann and company all lived at the time. West Palm was also the home of a complex then shared by the Atlanta Braves and Montreal Expos. These days, Auntie Ann, Dawn and Jessica all live in or around Port St. Lucie, as do other members of my family, like my Aunt Joan, Uncle Jack and cousin John. These two weeks, spent with family members that I don’t see that often, were fabulous, and I cherished them, to the point of turning off the rest of the world. When I wrote the book Trolley Tracks, though, I recalled another item that occurred during this time.

Thirty Years and Thirty Nights (Adding Three) is my delayed take on the brutal beating that a bunch of white policeman meted out on black motorist Rodney King, which happened on March 3, 1991, just three days after my 30th birthday. At the time of the actual event, I think I was not yet as advanced or mature as a poet to give my verse-oriented opinion on such a troubling sight. The ensuing unrest brought about by the subsequent trials of some of the officers in question at the time would clarify my feelings. In 1995, I found the voice, and Thirty Years and Thirty Nights (Adding Three) was the result. This piece still moves me a bit, as I hope it moves the reader. Why Do I Cry?, another poem that questions the world that we now live in, is surely an added thought to be considered following Thirty Years and Thirty Nights (Adding Three).

On the baseball side, I looked back on historical events, like Jackie Robinson’s first day in the Majors (If You Should Rise on Tuesday), as well as what the game has meant to me and mine (Schoolyards Beyond Mind and Majors). The death of Mickey Mantle spurred the piece Calling Mickey, which is merely a thank you to a guy whom I saw play actively for the briefest of whiles. Nonetheless, Mickey was always a favorite, not only for his fabulous skills, but also for his humanity, which seemed to