North American Stadiums - Grady Chambers

Скачать книгу

through plate glass windows.

      *

      Their dust does not belong to me, but many nights I have loved them.

      They do not live where I was born, north of the mammoth

      glass residences of the Gold Coast

      where the worst news

      was soon mended: a neighbor girl’s bone

      broken in a fall. A garage fire sullying the air

      over Broadway and Balmoral. I did not know

      their sons: the Byrnes, the Walshes, the Mansekies

      of Bridgeport and Fuller Park. The green parade and the green

      river and the pride of the Irish. Laughter, bright

      balloons over cracked asphalt, yellow hair

      and sunlight, all the families singing songs

      of another country.

      *

      I keep taking the long road back

      to that summer because the image won’t leave me:

      weekend evenings, gin and driving south, smoke

      blasting from the factory stacks,

      the men glancing up at the flash of our passing.

      We were going to spend all night drinking gin

      on an Indiana beach. Dust had settled

      like fragments of a hand grenade, like silver wings

      across the backs of the men. We were going to tell each other

      what was beautiful.

      *

      The dark water was beautiful. The fire drowning

      the air with smoke, our voices

      drowned by the sound.

      I stood at the edge of the water

      where the coastline stretched from my left

      and curved enough north that the stitch

      of factory lights looked like they were shining

      from the far side of the lake.

      We burned traces into the air with the burning

      tips of sticks poked into the heart of fire.

      We all said the sky was beautiful. Our bodies light

      against the water.

      *

      Somewhere in South Chicago the millwrights and welders

      of US Steel are leaving their masks to hooks

      and they are going home. What did I know then? What did I know

      of the beauty of the men?

      Driving past, I watched just long enough

      to see them stepping out of their shifts,

      believing them angelic, knowing not a thing

      about their lives, each of them, perhaps, seeing what I saw: light

      coming off the backs of the others as they drifted

      into the lot, but knowing the light I saw was dust,

      not wings, and, knowing to call it dust,

      calling it dust.

       Thousand Islands

      Just past border patrol we round the corner

      toward Thousand Islands Bridge

      when the car coming toward us veers and Kira cries

      out and braces against the sweep of headlights

      as the car nears and straightens and skids

      then straightens and in a spit of snow

      comes to rest on the shoulder, quiet,

      undamaged, ticking. I’m as nervous as Kira

      though I try not to show it as she sighs

      back into her seat.

      After Michael died, Mark went to rehab

      and Danny lost his hair and disappeared

      each weekend into the High Sierra,

      and Brian worked his torso into a perfect board, a stacked

      abdomen

      and a thick grid of veins raised beneath his forearms

      when he flexed.

      After Michael died, we stood in a basement

      and drank soda out of plastic cups and watched a montage

      of him becoming young again.

      We reach the peak of the bridge

      and Kira leans to the window to watch the bricked ice

      glide by below, and what I remember is

      we flew a kite, Michael and I, a grey November Saturday,

      he knelt in a field and pulled it from its box,

      shimmied the rods into the slits,

      the cloth growing taut across the frame.

      He threw me the spool and jogged out

      and shouted, Now! freeing the kite while I reeled in the

      string to make it climb.

      And it did, it lifted, he whooped and stumbled toward me,

      he took the spool from my hands and zigzagged out

      across the darkening field, his eyes skyward, his tongue

      curled

      from the corner of his mouth, Michael, Gordo, chubby

      in his Little League tee, undone buttons, his chest

      a soft shelf of flesh, the flabby puds of his nipples

      pressing through his shirt, eyes tight in concentration.

      And time passed, it grew cold, I slipped my hands

      into my sleeves, a dog barked, I called, Michael, Michael, he

      shrugged

      and chinned the air, Look at it! It made a ragged snap,

      it seemed proud, what color was it? It hung there like a wish,

      I said,

      Michael, pleading, I wanted to go home.

      I tell none of this to Kira as the wipers rise and fall

      against the snow.

      How could I explain it? My friends

      working their bodies into youth

      as they grow older, Michael tethered to a kite

      while I called his name,

      the snowy road, night falling.

      And how can I explain that when she puffs her bottom lip

      and blows her bangs from her eyes

      there is so much love inside me

      I want to pull the car to the shoulder

      and hold her there, while all I can do

      is nod at the shoreline

      and say, When it’s warm, we’ll come back here.

      And I think that maybe

Скачать книгу