North American Stadiums - Grady Chambers

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        About the Author

       Explaining the Resurrection in Simple Words

      A blessing can be the act

      of invoking divine

      protection,

      or a favor or gift

      bestowed by god,

      and I don’t know

      how to define mercy,

      but the field

      is lit like the heart

      of the night, gnats flitting

      above the crosshatched grass,

      huge shadows of the ballplayers in stadium light

      whistling in signals

      from the outfield.

      The wind lifts and settles

      our shirts against our skin,

      and you ask after my day:

      there’d been pinwheels

      spinning on a rain-soaked lawn, pigeons

      cooing and nesting in the gutters.

      I’d pressed my back to the dark

      damp wood of the trunk.

      Yellow flowers fell on me.

       I

       Syracuse, October

      Fuck the hot autumns of Charleston, fuck handsome

      Alabama, fuck the Deep South alcoholics

      standing in flannel in the summer sun. I drove north.

      I took Green Road to Hubbardsville

      and saw October in August, booted men hosing grit

      off the park pool’s bottom, crisp leaves lifted

      like the remnants of summer’s collective memory.

      I drove out or into it listening to the Liverpool Choir’s

      mournful version of the national anthem, the tuning forks

      of eastern townships bringing a Stravinsky more film score

      than symphony. I wanted the blaze of the unmuffled

      trumpet, the spin song of the laundromat, a little of the

      hurricane’s

      Guernican remedy in the streeted leaves, in the blooms

      of glass from kids breaking fluorescent

      light tubes in the spent vocabulary

      of an asphalt parking lot. I wanted

      October: lace trim of a black dress slumped

      on the floor of my birthday, cold skin

      and laughter. Little burn on the leaves, little love

      declaration; little dull light in the white sky.

       The Life

      So I drove while she nosed the folds of my sweatshirt

      on the bench seat of the Chevy and fell in love

      with my smell of ice rinks and rubber though my heart belonged

      to other beloveds: stanchions of high-voltage lines

      and the stalled horizon or something

      as simple as a sparse line of gulls

      gliding over the winter lake.

      My personal philosophy’s a second-story porch: bee-eaten

      beams, wobbly and rotted, corners filled

      with the day’s leavings: I liked Bach

      for a time and she my soft hands and I

      her sun-bleached Cleveland beginnings: but the sepia pictures

      and not the life, how they reminded me of photos of old

      ballplayers from the early twentieth century,

      and I liked more the skateboarder

      clearing leaves from the avenue’s cluttered gutters

      and the street psychic stating the obvious: it’s November

      and we could all use some luck. So we hit Milwaukee

      and why? Why not: the art museum was startling,

      church wood and folk art and the cracked expanse

      of lake ice through the windows. So she liked my mind

      or kind eyelashes and bulldozed my back as I fumbled

      to say something pretty to bridge the distance.

      And we bowled in a basement alley; and we got loaded

      and sober and saw the wind carry a leaf

      like a hand, stem down, brown palm open

      and twirling like a waiter carrying a tray

      brimming with champagne flutes: it would take us to

      Detroit, Chicago, the spread Midwest, the sun setting

      where it always does, Iowa

      before winter’s end: where we felt the cold come down

      through the hours to a moment fluttered open

      like a shuffled deck: taillights on the highway

      in patterned brigade, smoke bolstered through idling pipes;

      her wondering who I loved, the horseshoe shadow

      of my arms proclaiming this, all this.

       Another Beauty I Remember

      Somewhere in South Chicago the millwrights and welders

      of US Steel are leaving their masks

      to hooks and lockers and shining out

      into evening still covered in dust.

      Those men do not belong to me, their world of arc

      and fire, but many nights I have loved them.

      *

      When I was seventeen

      my friends and I rode each weekend

      toward the Indiana border. One drove, another worked the dials

      on the radio, and I drank gin in the back

      and ordered us to slow over the toll bridge

      to peer down at the barge lights roaming the Calumet River,

      then up to where the smokestacks of US Steel

      rose like an organ in a church. Gin, fire, the workers

      coming off their shifts, light lighting up the metal-dust

      spread along their shoulders like the men

      had

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