Читать книгу North American Stadiums - Grady Chambers - Страница 10

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.