North American Stadiums. Grady Chambers
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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