North American Stadiums. Grady Chambers
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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