ANOTHER STATE
A half day’s travel brings us
no closer. And when we do stop,
there are no video distractions,
no music with a pulse louder
than our own, just two
attentive bartenders who
watch you apply lip balm,
repin your sagging hair, finger
your glass. They wait to refill
what you won’t make empty.
We cross into another state,
one that takes up two pages
in my Rand-McNally, where
an inch of highway
covers little ground.
There is no growth here, no
trees, no shade or dry grass,
nothing to keep your eyes off me.
Still, I see the long shadow
of your desire, hear your heart
that you keep mute beneath
my old college tee shirt
you now claim as yours.
I told you once you liked
to dress like me. That was before
the touches that serve as warnings,
the shouts that drown out reason,
your looks that lend direction.
No reason to love you now
but for the distance.
THE CONS
The defeat occurred before the game began,
the recognition that for the first time
I was wearing shoes, sensible shoes,
not sneakers, to a basketball game.
Though it’s been a decade since I last
launched a jump shot, back when I still
possessed the ability to jump, these
momentary departures from terra firma,
seeing my feet shrouded in stitched soles
and raised heels made me feel I was
in need of a good dusting.
What was I thinking? That Coach K
was going to locate me in the stands,
point me toward the scorer’s table, tell me
to shut down #23, deny him baseline?
The line I’d crossed was no longer desiring
other spectators, the ex-players, to know me
as one of them, to grant me our allegiance.
We were the Cons, short for the Converse Crowd,
the basketball players from the other town
who traversed the county in fives to play
wherever were the better games,
whose New York City crusade was to find
a sporting goods store that sold high tops
in Tar Heel blue. Woodsie said he’d seen
a pair, and maybe he had, or maybe we
just wanted something more than our four
choices: high tops, low cuts, black or white.
These are the stories I want to tell
the student in front of me whose line of sight
is not cast upon the players or the tight game
before him, but on whoever is paused
on the other end of his cell phone,
this distracted dude whose thumbs move
in nervous tics, who doesn’t root for either team,
who wears his Chuck Taylors unlaced.
Woodsie called the other night from Ridgewood
to let me know Bo was in town. They’d just
come off the golf course. I didn’t have to ask
if they or Shylock or Hosselet still played hoop,
if they were the guys we once hated
to play, the old, slow guys who couldn’t get
to their spots, who banged you around, the guys
we called Meats, each one of us now
a victim of gravity, boxing out
the people we’d become.
Michael Darcher 