Maps. John Freeman
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sun-seared spots on his narrow shoulders.
He lost an eye. Blew out his left eardrum
in a packing-plant accident.
He didn’t make friends, a luxury
time could not afford, smoked
through college while doubling
as an accountant, dedicating nights to numbers,
pleasure in the orderly arrangement of the known.
A gift, my father was born at the end of the
Great Depression to my grandfather’s German wife — unaware of
the rubble from which he emerged.
A child among the fragrant groves
of Sacramento imported to give a desert
town some shade. Given a ’57 Chevy
at sixteen, my father rolled it twice
driving home from football games,
license never suspended, too easy
to make such things go away. His father,
midclimb into the airless summit of his
unexpected career, did not attend his games.
The sting of failure learned unobserved.
Davis, then Berkeley, then seminary,
where, among closeted homosexuals
and anguished penitents, my father felt in God
a familiar sense of bruised neglect.
He dropped out, worked as a prison
guard with teenagers put away for
knife fights and petty thievery,
one year, peripheral vision and dropstep
adjusted, never softened.
I was born in Cleveland, where he moved
for more school yet sensed the developing sinkhole.
My mother, cute as a young nurse,
from an Ohio land-grant family who paid her
credit-card bills. They lived near Woodland,
he wore zipper boots, drove a dropped ’69 Mustang.
It took years to conceive. Their gratitude for children
was immense.
A brick thrown at his head from a passing bus
reminded him that though he felt an outsider,
the color of his skin appeared white.
Nights in Long Island and then
Pennsylvania, his lips on our heads,
so kind as to be unnoticed. We slept unbroken.
I don’t remember once having dinner after six.
Our biggest complaint, the wait before we could
race out into the humid falling dark to hear
the pop of the ball against our mitts.
Thirty years after he left Sacramento, we returned,
his mother long since dead. The sun poured
down on our backs at the swim club, sunspots scorched
onto our broad shoulders. Waking to mists, to tinny clock-radio top-
forty hits, we sleepwalked to the garage
in the gloaming, where at five he stood
counting newspapers sprung from their plastic
wrappers, my brothers and I pedaling into the fog to
the squeal and crank of our bicycles.
Halfway through the route, we’d come upon his car,
rear gate agape, Bach aerating the silence,
a lightship docked among the palm fronds
of an indifferent neighborhood mapped by
a developer who had long since died. He tosses
us another forty papers, packed roughly
and quickly so that we never finished later
than six.
Sarajevo (Summer 2016)
She pointed, two hundred meters: there. I was
fifteen. We were drinking wine outside
a bookshop. The shelling lasted
all night. The ruby-colored sunset, the river
close. The theater so crowded
people sat in one another’s laps. Bombs fell so near every
few minutes, parts of the stage splintered.
I’m leaning on a car, cool
metal, smoked glass. The actors,
she tells me, didn’t flinch, didn’t miss
a single line. The audience
didn’t move, didn’t
make a sound.
You’re here; you survived;
and you’re there —
floor shaking, streets buckle —
watching a play that
for eternity will last.
Swap Meet
Stingrays black as bats,
hoods forked open flashing piston heads, Lincolns
with suicide doors,
throat-red interiors, steering wheels
spoked like spiderwebs —
we admired the catch, cowl induction
scoops spit-ragged clean, Mustangs with
cherry-red drive shafts, VWs small and tidy,