Mildred & Giuseppe
/Daniel Thomas Moran
At the delicatessen on
Henry St. in The Heights,
he was the senior counterman
at only sixteen years of age.
The 8th grade diploma from
P.S. 32 over on Union made
him the family scholar at the
brownstone on Woodhull St.
He had escaped the docks &
(unlike his brother Sal) the glamorous
& greasy clutches of the Gallo boys.
Culling from the brass cash register,
he took to filling salvaged jars with
Indianhead pennies, & the occasional
nickel, intent on taking them to his grave.
Over those early months,
of six days & long hours
laboring for the Dutchman,
packing white bread & mustard
around thin-sliced meat & cheese,
She came in, occasionally at first,
for packages of Chesterfields,
And then, to visit with her future,
in a stained and starched white apron,
working the boards & macaroni salad.
The Kraut & Kosher pickles were
kept souring in dark silence in two
big oak barrels of brine.
His first expressions of love
came in the shape of snug cigarette
packs he pilfered on her behalf,
women hanging smoke in the air
still scandalous, even among the
dank & sooty streets of Brooklyn.
But she was blonde & gorgeous,
cast like a Venus dream at twenty-two,
& never having heard spoken the
euphonious tones of Italian in her life.
They stole away on his off day,
bought the license required &
promised their lives to one another,
before a magistrate on Court Street.
They bore first fruit a year later
& they named her Jeannie, a woman
who would become Mother to me.
That is how it was, & likely how
it is still, life working its insouciant
sleight of hand in dark rooms, light
upon ruffled sheets in the steam heat.
And I have had this life doing the
very same, pilfering as I can, making
love between the shifts of my labor,
Witness to a life made possible by
a libretto of longing glances &
the slow choke of liberated smokes.
Daniel Thomas Moran, born in New York City in 1957, is the author of seventeen collections of poetry. His new collection, “Five Questions” will be published by Salmon Poetry in Ireland in early 2026. "In the Kingdom of Autumn", was published by Salmon Poetry in 2020, who also published his previous collection, "A Shed for Wood" in 2014. His "Looking for the Uncertain Past” was published by Poetry Salzburg in 2005. He has had more than four hundred poems published in over twenty different countries. In 2005, he was appointed Poet Laureate by The Legislature of Suffolk County, New York. His collected papers are being archived at Stony Brook University.
