Joe Dolce: ‘Disappearance of Harold Holt’, ‘Roll-Your-Own Langston’ and ‘St Roch’

Disappearance of Harold Holt

The PM had been advised to swim less,
that day at Cheviot Beach, in Portsea,
Harold had often swum there in the past.

He wanted relief from the hot day’s blast,
to work up an appetite before tea,
Harold had often swum there in the past.

The doctor medicated his distress:
morphine, for a childhood sports injury.
The PM had been advised to swim less.

In deeper water, the undertow’s press,
large swells and eddies dragged him out to sea.
Harold had often swum there in the past.

Three hundred and forty searchers were massed;
they failed to recover his lost body.
The PM had been advised to swim less,
Harold had often swum there in the past.

Joe Dolce

Roll-Your-Own Langston

Bereft of kindling newsprint,
being a particularly cold bush night,
reluctantly, I reached for the dry leaves
of The Poetry of the Negro: 1746-1970.

Ripping out First Line Index,
Biographical Notes, I began
lighting the Tributary Poems by Non-Negroes—
Melville, Whitman and Sandburg,
pausing at Elizabeth Bishop,
tearing Dickey, Longfellow, Blake.

When cigarette papers ran out,
a real conundrum:
with whom would I share breath?

I chose Langston Hughes’ I Too Sing America,
a fine poem, no doubt a fine smoke.
If cancer were to fog an x-ray,
no worthier bloke.

Scissoring a rectangle, from … I am the darker brother …
down to … they’ll see how beautiful I am …
I tobacco’d up, rolling
and thread-tying a beedi.

Inhaling, I watched the orange edge
erasing phrases,
nobody’ll dare, vanishing,
eat in the kitchen, becoming ash.
The burning poem pinched my fingers;
I stubbed it out.

Nicotine-dazed, eyes closed,
I raised supplication to the poet.

I might smoke Countee Cullen next

Joe Dolce

St Roch
Alas! our ships enter the port, but of a thousand sailors, hardly ten are spared.
—Gabriele de’ Mussi

During Chaucer’s childhood,
the Black Death, brought by
a Genoese ship to Sicily,
killed a third of Europe.

Boccaccio’s The Decameron guided Italians:
“How to maintain mental well-being,
in times of epidemics and isolation”.

The Plague took Shakespeare’s older sisters,
Margaret & Joan, but exposure
as a baby may have gifted him immunity,
surviving four outbreaks,
closing theatres, but, during quarantines,
writing King Lear, Macbeth.

Titian died of it.
His apprentice, Tintoretto,
painted for twenty years,
from the Venetian plague-church,
Scuola Grande di San Roch—

St Roch (the Rock): patron of dogs,
invalids, knee problems, bachelors,
diseased cattle, falsely accused people,
gravediggers, second-hand dealers,
surgeons, pilgrims and pestilence.

Joe Dolce