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[ two poems by Joseph Bathanti ]
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The Cellar
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When my sister talked to boys on the phone,
she stretched the cord down the cellar stairs
into the dark and whispered.
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My parents didn’t like her down there, barefoot
on cold concrete, without a light,
talking to a boy. We had to pretend
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nothing at all odd about it –
supper on the table, sacramental
supper, the sacred daily rite
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of our commingled lives interrupted.
We couldn’t even mention Marie
in the cellar, exchanging on the phone
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whatever it might have been, at that moment,
with a nameless boy.
Everything had to be as if it weren’t happening;
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that was how one got through things.
My parents would have punished me
had they known what I was thinking.
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I was not at all curious about them.
But I often wondered about Marie,
sixteen, 1966: Johnson’s first term
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after the assassination,
the year I started remembering
with dreadful precision.
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My father taught her to drive
our blue Belair. Riding shotgun,
I adored that Chevy, my sister behind the wheel,
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windows down, her long hair blowing.
I punched radio buttons, station to station,
lashing music over us, like I was typing her story,
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as she sang from memory, and I mumbled.
Without even realizing, she shaved the hairpin
on Mellon Terrace while I held my breath
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and tried to get it all down with speed
and truth before 1967 showed up
and she left for college at Slippery Rock.
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I loved her secret life,
living all the yearned for alone,
in the cellar: with the coal furnace,
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copper pipes weaving in and out
of the ancient rafters that held up the house,
my father’s tools, our sleds,
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shelves of empty jars, canned hams,
fruit cocktail—statues and crucifixes
my mother thought a little much for upstairs.
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In her nightgown, Mother washed clothes
down there, where my father shaved,
our retreat when we craved solitude,
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in it very center a drain
that flowed to the city sewer,
then the Allegheny, west on the Ohio,
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all the way to California.
Marie ascended to us, from the cellar,
changed, all of us changed.
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What had she and that boy talked of?
We made the Sign of the Cross,
said Grace, and ate supper.
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Joseph Bathanti
from Steady Daylight, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, LA; © 2026 by Joseph Bathanti
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❀ ❀ ❀
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Right Guard
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As he aged, my father dwindled,
not in stature—though he grew smaller
as elders must—but rather in estate.
He never required much,
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insisted on giving things away.
What am I going to do with all this?
Suddenly I had his shirt,
wristwatch, hammer and plane—
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his car keys and driver’s license
when the time came. I arrived,
the night of his death, and stole a moment alone in his room
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at The Pines, a name too green
and pulsing, filled with trees—
near infuriating—for a tomb.
My mother had died a year earlier.
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To save money to pass along to me
and my sister, my father requested
a move to an efficiency—a monk’s cell.
At heart, he was an ascetic.
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I sat on the edge of his small bed,
where he’d perched that morning—
September 3,
his 59th wedding anniversary,
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my mother gone a year—to quell his vertigo,
hands folded, his dawn office,
before launching his day.
He witnessed the first rind
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of sabbath sun cross the sash.
Song sparrows chanted Asperges me.
Then, prepared, he rose.
I stood and paced behind his shade,
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gauging where, in the modest span
between his bedclothes and coffeepot,
he decided to join my mother—
privately, no announcement, illness,
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deathwatch. No priest.
The attention would have embarrassed him.
His only flourish was the white pressed
handkerchief on him at all times.
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Perhaps he glimpsed his fetch
or, responsive to my mother’s whims,
her beckoning;
or his own mother, whom, at five,
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he’d lost to childbirth.
Given neither to signs nor bodement,
never mysterious, but like us all
who parse life step by step,
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my father kept a secret life
he alone entered—nothing terrible,
or even curious—a silent chamber
he had the wisdom, the courage,
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to leave locked, the key hidden—
though he had little use for metaphor.
A millwright, a steelman,
he discovered the ladled heat,
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and molten pour, the union shop,
a practice he abided and died for.
What was there left of his to take?
He’d already given me everything.
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I wandered into the tiny bathroom.
Stationed on the shelf above the sink
stood a can of Right Guard,
the only deodorant my dad used—
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Original, of course, Sport:
the logo stick figure, in full throttle,
bolting from the blocks.
I grabbed it and pressed the actuator.
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The valve hissed and hung a familiar
incensed mist. Out of it,
like a genie summoned from its lamp,
appeared my father.
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Joseph Bathanti
from Steady Daylight, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, LA; © 2026 by Joseph Bathanti
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salamander eggs
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❀ ❀ ❀
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spirit and element, inseparably connected, receiveth a fullness of joy;
Doctrine and Covenants 90:5e (1833)
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What was there left of his to take?
He’d already given me everything.
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Elemental – reduced to its essential form, pure, vital, a foundation upon which everything else can be built. Joseph Bathanti’s poems in Steady Daylight. Here in a few words and lines is a life; here are many lives, family, community. Here is a life’s span, from unremembered ancestors through all the days on earth to gathering in the celestial. Here is school and church and baseball, steel mill and pearl-handled basting knife, scungilli and sfogliatelle, the lingering perfume of de Nobili cigars and incense of Right Guard. Every image is pure. Every moment is alive. Read these lines and live.
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When Joseph Bathanti sits down with pen and paper the universe stretches, edges itself up around him, and words become its center. Some poetry is music but these poems are whispered secrets, thwacks on the back of the head, huge smothering hugs from floral aunts, hundred pound hods of mortar. Steady Daylight is a world that has completely drawn me into itself. As I read I become the boy, the man, the child of mother and father. The simplest daily routine and the most mundane object reveal their essence. They are good. The drain in the cellar connects the house to the entire world. Sitting down to supper changes everything. Each of us must eat. Each of us must face the last day of someone we love, and our own last day. Take a moment for Grace, for a few words that want to connect it all. Spirit and element, the days of our lives woven into a pattern so frustratingly complicated that we can’t tell its beginning from its end, but so simple that we discover it in one word – joy.
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❀ ❀ ❀
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Joseph Bathanti has written more than twenty books: poetry, novels, short stories. He served as North Carolina Poet Laureate from 2012-2014, has been inducted into the NC Literary Hall of Fame, and received the state’s highest civilian honor, the North Carolina Award in Literature. Every time he as arrived in Elkin to read at our public library, he begins his remarks, “It’s good to be back in the center of the universe.” I believe he carries that center with him everywhere he goes.
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Steady Daylight is available from LSU Press
HERE
Other poems by Joseph Bathanti at Verse and Image:
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