Knox - Play out the match

PLAY OUT THE MATCH

MICHAEL KNOX Copyright Michael Knox, 2006 Published by ECW PRESS 2I20 Queen Street East, Suite 200,
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4E IE2 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted in any form by any process electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior written
permission of the copyright owners and ECW PRESS. LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES OF CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION Knox, Michael, 1978
Play out the match / Michael Knox. A MisFit book.
Poems.
ISBN 1-55022-723-8 I. ReconciliationPoetry. Title. Title.

PS862I.N69P53 20O6 C8II.6 C2006-900476-5 Editor: Michael Holmes/a misFit book
Cover and Text Design: Tania Craan
Cover photo: Craig van der Lende / Getty
Author photo: Andrea McKenzie
Typesetting: Mary Bowness
Printing: Gauvin This book is set in AGaramond With the publication of Play Out the Match ECW PRESS acknowledges the generous financial
support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development
Program (BPIDP), the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council, for our
publishing activites. DISTRIBUTION
CANADA: Jaguar Book Group, 100 Armstrong Avenue,
Georgetown, Ontario, L7G 5S4 PRINTED AND BOUND IN CANADA For my Mother

I wish to gratefully acknowledge the support of the following, whether moral, editorial or philosophic: My Family, Lindsay Wilson, Michael Holmes, Eddie Gebbie,
Ali Hejripour, Marina Mandal, Peter Fraser, Margaret
Calverley, Andrea McKenzie, Jenn Doherty, Jenny Banks,
and the University of Toronto Schools. I would also like to acknowledge the following literary journals and publications for publishing many of these poems in slightly different forms: Pottersfield Portfolio
Ygdrasil: Journal of the Poetic Arts
The Breath Magazine
Forget Magazine
Surface Online Journal of the Arts
Ligature
Stirring: A Literary Collection
Subtle Tea
The Malahat Review You are ever huge and complacent miraculously balancing your width on a comically narrow bar stool in my mind. Drizzle spattering panes in that little Ayrshire pub a thousand generations of our families affiliation stretching back behind us. Old oak of a man. Body like a bunch of hard fists an easy clench on a pint of the black stuff wide knuckles reaching up halfway on the glass and that great watchful back probably better than your puckered eyes always trained fast on that blurry set for nothing but rugby or football matches.

Glasgow brawls left stubborn nicks, ironic tears in the brow of the animated boulder of your face red like mine but heavier like your body denser more elemental. As if youd sprung from the very highland earth. I admit I was always jealous of it your notched face merrily mocking that I was better off getting by on my looks and clapping the scarred weight of a massive unreal hand like a grown uncle on my stringy shoulder because we both knew strength is all you really loved. When the doctors said your liverd had it and to lay off the drink and the smoke you regaled us. Told it like a joke. Aye lads, dead in the face sip fuckyu.

You werent the kind of man to hear things twice and they knew it. So you kept on boasting that youd finish the match the way youd always played it and sly wink hoped they were tapping a keg for you in heaven. We lost our nerve to look scared. A coward, I put a loyal hand on your rocky shoulder and gave a stiff-chinned nod and a wink and got us a round of the pure. But somehow, I know you were scared. Faced suddenly with something you couldnt square off with in the rainy streets.

And on the way home at night splashing the trapped stars free of their puddles and laying in that tiny complaining bed of yours alone even through the drink you were afraid. We all feel about for the horizons of our limitations and yours were closer than youd ever let on holding court at your bar stool. Mortality levels this playing field of ours. You knew you were too terrified not to drink all day in the pub. We both knew you were not indomitable in the world beyond that smoke-hazed little nook our world of cigars and malts and the occasional crunching punch-up. And stepping home needled with lowland rain I think that you must have resolved each night to stand tomorrow to take a new life in this world. But sitting up in bed in the morning with that blend whisky bottle on your nightstand you looking at sky the colour of smoke and thought on all the dispassion and resignation in things and with a belt or two to mash out the hangover you rose and in what you may have pretended was courage and integrity but was only soft submission said to the late morning, Another day Ive been given and resolved in soliloquy that you would play it the best way you knew and really the only way and you probably even winked at yourself in the mirror swallowing your shame.

And know that I forgive you your weakness though it was not your habit to do so in others. Only the most resolute of us will not buckle in the flicker of our strength heaven or no heaven.

The snows came on early this year quiet banshee cursing our names and piling the streets. Heavy barricades at our doors; ours cars all wheezing shuddering junk. Striking fathers try to forget newfound anxiety insomnia alcoholism and build snowmen with toddlers that only come out warped. They must find something instead of carrots and coal for noses.

Times are tight, Daddy says with a meek smile that doesnt reach his eyes. Teenage girls flip sullenly through fashion magazines; sulk through windows at grey-lit streets heavy with cloud winter half-light and dream of other worlds. People go out as little as possible. Women boil water in cold kitchens and drink worried cups of tea. There is nothing to say when their husbands pass. The kitchen table fills with unopened mail.

Watchful listening nights the husband sits and stares hopelessly into the pointed white pile. On the picket lines the men huddle together. They have left the enthused marching and chanting from the autumn. No one drives by to honk support. All watch the great shadow of the mill and it watches them quiet snow drifting down on dead air fearful silence everywhere. Teenage boys go silent for weeks.

Gather to breathe bags of glue in the parks at night and sit alone with their nightmares in their dark basement rooms fierce and stagnant. The girl suspends herself from a beam in her room. A bell shadow of her dress across the wall tolling silently over the whole town.

All week I scan flimsy dollar store goods and ride the bus benches home late at night to a house that is all bent rum caps in ashtrays and drone bleary-eyed through my school days with everyone I dont know looking on with quiet concern. My skin is curdled, the ugly pallor of milk, and the other girls giggle together and chat on their cell phones and are all smooth brown legs and no-socks in fashionable sneakers while I am inexplicably in tears in the bath or break room or jostled by every bump on the last bus home alone. And I stopped one February night on the bridge that goes over the highway and looked at the distant skyline from the very edge of this massive city and thought how much Id love to flee its loneliness and take a bus far away, because everyone can flee by bus, even part-time dollar store cashiers, and I could just forget all of them in an instant and be gone for somewhere else.Next page