Chambers - North American stadiums: poems

2018, Text by Grady Chambers All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Milkweed Editions, 1011 Washington Avenue South, Suite 300, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55415. (800) 520-6455 milkweed.org Published 2018 by Milkweed Editions Printed in the United States of America Cover design by Mary Austin Speaker with vector images by love pattern / Shutterstock Author photo by Jessica Scicchitano 18 19 20 21 22 5 4 3 2 1 First Edition Milkweed Editions, an independent nonprofit publisher, gratefully acknowledges sustaining support from the Jerome Foundation; the Lindquist & Vennum Foundation; the McKnight Foundation; the National Endowment for the Arts; the Target Foundation; and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. Also, this activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and a grant from Wells Fargo. For a full listing of Milkweed Editions supporters, please visit milkweed.org. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chambers, Grady.

North American stadiums: poems / by Grady Chambers. Description: Minneapolis, Minnesota : Milkweed Editions, [2018] Identifiers: LCCN 2018009103 (print) | LCCN 2018003189 (ebook) | ISBN 9781571319937 (ebook) | ISBN 9781571315045 (hardcover : acid-free paper) Classification: LCC PS3603.H354 (print) | LCC PS3603.H354 A6 2018 (ebook) | DDC 811/.6--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018009103 Milkweed Editions is committed to ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book production practices with this principle, and to reduce the impact of our operations in the environment. We are a member of the Green Press Initiative, a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the worlds endangered forests and conserve natural resources. North American Stadiums was printed on acid-free 100% postconsumer-waste paper by Thomson-Shore. Table of Contents

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 dont 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: thered been pinwheels spinning on a rain-soaked lawn, pigeons cooing and nesting in the gutters. Id pressed my back to the dark damp wood of the trunk. Yellow flowers fell on me. ISyracuse, 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 pools bottom, crisp leaves lifted like the remnants of summers collective memory.

I drove out or into it listening to the Liverpool Choirs 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 hurricanes 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 philosophys a second-story porch: bee-eaten beams, wobbly and rotted, corners filled with the days 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 avenues cluttered gutters and the street psychic stating the obvious: its 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 winters 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 all walked 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 girls 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 wont 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.