Rooks

by Gil Fagiani

In his first book of poetry, Gil Fagiani is a rook, “the deepest bucket of whale shit in the deepest part of the ocean,” as the epigram tells us. The reader follows the poet through freshman year at Pennsylvania Military College, Class of 1967, where the spotlight is on the time-honored discipline that transforms young men into warriors. We sit with him on the third floor of Howell Hall “zipped up in his cadet blouse/ hair cut back to the bone.” In “Spit Shines,” the poet teases beauty from the soft rag buffing of shoes,” a Lincoln penny/in black wax.” PMC is located in the heart of the decaying city of Chester, Pennsylvania. Fagiani sets these vastly different worlds into a brilliant counterpoint: one is antiseptic and ordered, the other, shabby and chaotic. In “Local Girls” the daughters of immigrant Ukrainians and Poles “who pull double shifts/in front of the blast furnaces/ of Penn State Casting” speed past the cadets, a cloud of locusts, in banged up Chevies.

While organized violence is bred at PMC, the violence that spills from the town is fitful and random. We visit “Ukrainian Hall” where “somebody smashes a glass pitcher/and waves the bloody handle.” And “The Chester Arms,” is the bar where cadets and locals collide, and the “Isley Brothers preach/the gospel of pussy” while customers slug it out. An aura of presentiment hovers over Rooks: military escalation in Vietnam, political assassinations, burning cities, the larger social conflagration about to engulf America. The imagery of these poems is full of shit-on-a-shingle, grenade throws, latrines, swagger sticks, but there are also “golden-yellow/daisy faces/crushed in the imprints/of tank treads” Fagiani’s language, sometimes gritty and humorous, is always energized and passionate. He suspends his poems often in midair, shocking them into silence.

Gil Fagiani attended Pennsylvania Military College from 1963 to 1967. He is a poet, short story writer, essayist and translator. His poetry has appeared in such anthologies as Off the Cuffs: Poetry by and about the Police, edited by Jackie Sheeler, and Sweet Lemons: Writings With a Sicilian Accent, edited by Venera Fazio and Delia De Santis. In 2004 a collection of his poetry set in East Harlem in the 1960’s: Crossing 116th Street: A Blanquito in El Barrio, was published in the literary journal Skidrow Penthouse. In 2005, he won an “Honorable Mention” for both the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards, and the Bordighera Prize.

Fagiani co-hosts the monthly open reading of the Italian American Writers’ Association at the Cornelia Street Café, in New York City. His translations of nine poems from Abruzzese dialect to English were published last year in The Journal of Italian Translation edited by Luigi Bonaffini.

by Gil Fagiani

The Chester Arms

A hot spring night in the Chester Arms.
Somebody jacks up the volume of the jukebox
and the room rocks to the sounds of
the Isley Brothers preaching
the gospel of pussy,
Chuck Jackson's "Beg Me."
I unbutton the collar of my uniform.

Joyce, slim, dark and doe-eyed sits across from me,
I can't keep my legs still.
She argues with one of her johns,
an Italian construction worker
covered with dirt and curly black hair.

The john pulls on her arm
spilling her Cutty Sark and milk
and she bounces a shot glass off his chest.
Mike, the bartender, takes his baseball bat
comes from behind the counter
and pushes them both out the door.

Avoiding the stares
of two brawny transvestites,
I listen to Ernest, a regular, boast
about his college days
when he drove a Porsche
and styled himself the Prince of Poon Tang.

I feed the juke box quarters
and down balls and beers
Ernest insists on paying for.
Out of the corner of my eye
I watch his wife,
a grizzly bear in a blonde wig,
hitting on every stud at the bar
wondering when Ernest is going to snap
and go upside her head.

Leaving to piss,
I return to Otis Redding's
"...gotta, gotta have it..."
the bass so loud the bar glasses rumble.
I hear scuffling in the lobby
and through a Dutch door
see Ernest whaling away
on one of the men his wife flirted with.

Buttoning my collar, I'm ready to split
when Ernest's wife backs me against the wall
shoves her hand between my legs,
"I hear cadet cock's the best there is," she says,
her wig as crooked as her smile.

Thanksgiving Fulough

First time home since I enter P.M.C:
Mess Hall grease oozes out of my skin
creating a mountain chain of zits,
my hair is sheared down to my skull
like I had psycho-surgery,
and I've switched
from puffing a pack of Luckies a day
to two packs of Pall Malls.

Nobody's in the neighborhood.
my best buddy's already at war,
on sick leave in `Nam,
shot in the hand
at the Bay of Saigon
while painting the side of his boat.
I'm so tired from pre-dawn drills
and midnight push-up parties
that I sleep twelve hours a day.
My aunts resent me after
I refuse to be photographed in uniform.

I visit my ex-girlfriend in Danbury
who sings a duet with her fiancée
while he plays the piano
in front of her father and mother
who toast the smiling couple
with glasses of peppermint schnapps
while I hide in a cloud of cigarette smoke.

At night I go to a bar in Brewster
chasing shots of Henessey with ale
until carried out the side door
like a sack of empty beer bottles.
I heave myself through hedges
trip over tree roots
and pass out on Route 51
my legs straight and my arms out
roused by two uniformed cops
kicking me into consciousness.

Bob Holman
Bowery Poetry Club

Now that Journalists are finally asking some hard (but basic) questions about what really led the nation into the latest phase in the war in Iraq; questions of how individuals are prepared to fight wars may be better left to the poets. No poet is better qualified to ask these questions than Gil Fagiani. In “Rooks,” his second collection of poetry, Fagiani, take the reader on a bare-knuckled tour of Pennsylvania Military College, against the backdrop of the Vietnam war.

Fagiani’s work, like the PMC itself, is tightly controlled. The freshman (rook) year is best thought of as a factory where young civilians are forged into elite officers, eventually to command and pass the abuse onto the next generation of cadets. In Spit Shines, Fagiani recalls the discipline and punish that makes mountains out of molehills:

At the morning muster, Sergeant Kotowski
Swaggers up to me
Points to a speck of dust on one shoe
“Hey, douche bag,
what did you polish your shoes with,
Brillo pads?”

The trick of military discipline is to give orders for everything, and consequences for the smallest deviation. The mechanics of battle and brutality, above all an ability to obey orders without question, are tested at the college. That’s the only logical reason why cadets are sentenced to a thousand humiliations daily ranging from a sentence of eating dinner under a table, to demerits and restriction for failing to remove grease from the interior of a radio. Fagiani describes the process that renders men into parts of the machine:

When the door opens
And Captain Doyle and his entourage enter,
We stand throbbing with pride:
Brass bright
Shoes like burnished marble,
Gray uniforms crisscrossed with white belts.

Fagiani isn’t writing protest poetry, at times his writing verges on journalism. He lets the reader draw his or her own conclusions, which much more respect than what was given to him in military college. While never once raising an accusatory finger, Rooks can only be read in the context of the era in which is was published, the War On Terror, not the Vietnam era. Rooks is a stunning, sobering, blueprint of a corner of the militarized mind, and as such offers the kind of subversion essential for dignified living.