Mike of the castles - Copy
"This is the end
Beautiful friend"
(J. Morrison)
who was wispy as his Dean Martin hair and sweetly ingratiating smile
can make Mike, at his Venetian window
turning a prize apple in his hand
for the signora & daughter he greets as do all the stoop-shouldered--
and Mike does (alone!)-- a proud grocer
reduced to a bloodied apron of a man.
I sensed, too, the elegant shiny storefront self would be gutted, stormed
by something like a lost wife and son
(obvious even to my childhood sense),
making Mike my own personal guide to the charred empty gaze, years later
of his defeated castle with its vacant
nameless unswept streets and skies
