A Toast for Little Iron Mike

Paul Mariani

Having come in out of the unrelenting
rain this late August Sunday morning,
a suppliant not unlike these West
German spies on the latest news,
their names by now uncovered
by the double agent who till yesterday
sat high up in the Bonn government so that
for reasons of state they must now begin
to disappear like so many autumn leaves,

I stand in the doorway of this modest
"starter" home here in this truckstop junction
just south of tweedy Dartmouth
& two hundred yards from the yawning,
sluggish, self-contained Connecticut
with its high-wired braided apparatus
as Peggy, my younger brother's wife,
still exhausted from her lenten vigil,
kens into view through the upper left

kitchen windowpane, surprised
to catch me standing here this early.
She holds Michael in her arms,
Michael: the latest member of the clan,
yellowbrown & knobby as a five-pound sack
of onions, two thin wires still dangling
from under his kimono. Six weeks shelving
into seven, wired, taped & monitored
night after night against the blue seizures

while his lungs sucked in the air
like famished lips after the proffered
madonna-blue-veined breast.
Michael Patrick Mariani has come home at last.
Unlike those troglyditic Cabbage Patch
premies all the rage a year ago last Christmas,
what this kid has had to go through, friend,
has been neither adorable nor cute.
And though neither of us would care

to say it, we might (knock wood)
have lost the little guy. She hands him to me.
My left thumb & forefinger cradling
his chicken neck & coffee-cup-sized cranium,
my right forearm catching his little bum
as the rain drips off my jacket.
I press my lips against his forehead
to keep myself from crying, the eyes
of his anxious, weathered, loving mother

still upon us, & recall my own wife's
three-time travail & the sunbronzed glory
of our scrapping sons, who in two weeks' time
will be scattered to the proverbial windblown
corners of this world, struggling
like the fieldweeds with what the young
have always had to struggle with:
the double agency of words, the whack
& thud of bodies bruised & bruising

on & off the football field,
the flying spray of oar along the river,
bright eyes, crisp talk, curve signs
& other such unsettling juvescent issues.
"Michael, you father loves you."
Thus DiNiro, fresh from ramming the towel-
muffling pistol into the baffled mafioso's mouth
& firing to protect his family
in what for me has become the central epic

of our immigrant America, supplanting the other
& equally violent mythos of an ante-bellum
fallen Trojan South. Yes, your father loves you,
as he limps into the kitchen in his bathrobe,
this tallest of the brothers, his Hong Kong
Navy blue tattoos emblazoned on his forearms,
& puts his arm around my should, he who
in ten years' time (or less)
with his worsening spondiolitis

may well have trouble even standing
& who more than ever now will need
steady work & medical protection.
He lights up a cigarette, stares in disbelief
into his firstborn's sleeping face & laughs
& all at once my aging mother has turned
28 again, settling his same brother
into my eager, adolescent arms
as though he were her one unbroken set of dishes

& I sing him like an unsprung pendulum
& then more gently, amazed & terrified
by the mystery of is pink & yawning mouth
& tiny, perfect fingers & for once it is enough,
this now, this present, this blessed
livid moment. Iron Mike, my brother Walter
has christened him already. So be it.
Little Iron Mike. So hold the burning baby
proud & high, all seven pounds eleven ounces,

as he mews into a steady high crescendo
the which has kept his parents up for weeks.
Praise too the herculean courage of his kid
who has had a harder go of it than most
but whose lusty squeaking lungs are learning
how to cope with the post-amniotic clearblue sea
of air about us. A toast to Mike, a toast made up
of 10,000 kisses to three parts formulaic milk.
This one, this one is for little Iron Mike.

Visit Paul Mariani as Image Artist of the Month for June 2000

Issue #1 Spring 1989