The Blue Buick

by B. H. Fairchild

  like some miniature white peak of the Himalayas

  as if she were a cave in the Himalayas,

  the cave of her own body, perhaps, in which

  she sat patiently now, looking out, waiting.

  Body and Soul

  Half-numb, guzzling bourbon and Coke from coffee mugs,

  our fathers fall in love with their own stories, nuzzling

  the facts but mauling the truth, and my friend’s father begins

  to lay out with the slow ease of a blues ballad a story

  about sandlot baseball in Commerce, Oklahoma, decades ago.

  These were men’s teams, grown men, some in their thirties

  and forties who worked together in zinc mines or on oil rigs,

  sweat and khaki and long beers after work, steel guitar music

  whanging in their ears, little white rent houses to return to

  where their wives complained about money and broken Kenmores

  and then said the hell with it and sang “Body and Soul”

  in the bathtub and later that evening with the kids asleep

  lay in bed stroking their husband’s wrist tattoo and smoking

  Chesterfields from a fresh pack until everything was OK.

  Well, you get the idea. Life goes on, the next day is Sunday,

  another ball game, and the other team shows up one man short.

  They say, we’re one man short, but can we use this boy,

  he’s only fifteen years old, and at least he’ll make a game.

  They take a look at the kid, muscular and kind of knowing

  the way he holds his glove, with the shoulders loose,

  the thick neck, but then with that boy’s face under

  a clump of angelic blond hair, and say, oh, hell, sure,

  let’s play ball. So it all begins, the men loosening up,

  joking about the fat catcher’s sex life, it’s so bad

  last night he had to sleep with his wife, that sort of thing,

  pairing off into little games of catch that heat up into

  throwing matches, the smack of the fungo bat, lazy jogging

  into right field, big smiles and arcs of tobacco juice,

  and the talk that gives cool, easy feeling to the air,

  talk among men normally silent, normally brittle and a little

  angry with the empty promise of their lives. But they chatter

  and say rock and fire, babe, easy out, and go right ahead

  and pitch to the boy, but nothing fancy, just hard fastballs

  right around the belt, and the kid takes the first two

  but on the third pops the bat around so quick and sure

  that they pause a moment before turning around to watch

  the ball still rising and finally dropping far beyond

  the abandoned tractor that marks left field. Holy shit.

  They’re pretty quiet watching him round the bases,

  but then, what the hell, the kid knows how to hit a ball,

  so what, let’s play some goddamned baseball here.

  And so it goes. The next time up, the boy gets a look

  at a very nifty low curve, then a slider, and the next one

  is the curve again, and he sends it over the Allis-Chalmers,

  high and big and sweet. The left fielder just stands there, frozen.

  As if this isn’t enough, the next time up he bats left-handed.

  They can’t believe it, and the pitcher, a tall, mean-faced

  man from Okarche who just doesn’t give a shit anyway

  because his wife ran off two years ago leaving him with

  three little ones and a rusted-out Dodge with a cracked block,

  leans in hard, looking at the fat catcher like he was the sonofabitch

  who ran off with his wife, leans in and throws something

  out of the dark, green hell of forbidden fastballs, something

  that comes in at the knees and then leaps viciously toward

  the kid’s elbow. He swings exactly the way he did right-handed,

  and they all turn like a chorus line toward deep right field

  where the ball loses itself in sagebrush and the sad burnt,

  dust of dustbowl Oklahoma. It is something to see.

  But why make a long story long: runs pile up on both sides,

  the boy comes around five times, and five times the pitcher

  is cursing both God and His mother as his chew of tobacco sours

  into something resembling horse piss, and a ragged and bruised

  Spalding baseball disappears into the far horizon. Goodnight,

  Irene. They have lost the game and some painful side bets

  and they have been suckered. And it means nothing to them

  though it should to you when they are told the boy’s name is

  Mickey Mantle. And that’s the story, and those are the facts.

  But the facts are not the truth. I think, though, as I scan

  the faces of these old men now lost in the innings of their youth,

  I think I know what the truth of this story is, and I imagine

  it lying there in the weeds behind that Allis-Chalmers

  just waiting for the obvious question to be asked: why, oh

  why in hell didn’t they just throw around the kid, walk him,

  after he hit the third homer? Anybody would have,

  especially nine men with disappointed wives and dirty socks

  and diminishing expectations for whom winning at anything

  meant everything. Men who knew how to play the game,

  who had talent when the other team had nothing except this ringer

  who without a pitch to hit was meaningless, and they could go home

  with their little two-dollar side bets and stride into the house

  with a bottle of Southern Comfort under their arms and grab

  Dixie or May Ella up and dance across the gray linoleum

  as if it were V-Day all over again. But they did not.

  And they did not because they were men, and this was a boy.

  And they did not because sometimes after making love,

  after smoking their Chesterfields in the cool silence and

  listening to the big bands on the radio that sounded so glamorous,

  so distant, they glanced over at their wives and noticed the lines

  growing heavier around the eyes and mouth, felt what their wives

  felt: that Les Brown and Glenn Miller and all those dancing couples

  and in fact all possibility of human gaiety and light-heartedness

  were as far away and unreachable as Times Square or the Avalon

  Ballroom. They did not because of the gray linoleum lying there

  in the half-dark, the free calendar from the local mortuary

  that said one day was pretty much like another, the work gloves

  looped over the doorknob like dead squirrels. And they did not

  because they had gone through a depression and a war that had left

  them with the idea that being a man in the eyes of their fathers

  and everyone else had cost them just too goddamned much to lay it

  at the feet of a fifteen-year-old boy. And so they did not walk him,

  and lost, but at least had some ragged remnant of themselves

  to take back home. But there is one thing more, though it is not

  a fact. When I see my friend’s father staring hard into the bottomless

  well of home plate as Mantle’s fifth homer heads toward Arkansas,

  I know that this man with the half-orphaned children and

  worthless Dodge has also encountered for his first and possibly

  only time the vast gap between talent and genius, has seen

  as few have in the harsh light of an Oklahoma Sunday, the blond

  and blue-eyed bringer of truth, who will not easily be forgiven.

  Airlifting Horses

&
nbsp; Boy soldiers gawk and babble, eyes rapt

  in what seems like worship as the horses rise

  in the bludgeoned air. A brushfire is swarming

  roads and highways, and the last way out is up

  or a flatboat in the lagoon. We used to drop

  the reins and let them race there, hurdling

  driftwood, heaps of kelp, waves lapping the sand

  in a lace maker’s weave of sea and foam.

  Now they’re startled into flight, and the air,

  stunned and savaged by the propeller’s flail,

  beats us back. Its sudden thunder must be a storm

  their skins have for the first time failed to sense.

  Cowering beneath the blades, we have cradled them

  like babies, strapped them in slings strong enough

  to lug trucks, and their silence is the purest tone

  of panic. Their great necks crane and arch,

  the eyes flame, and their spidery shadows,

  big-bellied and stiff-legged, swallow us,

  then dwindle to blotches on the tarmac

  as they lift. The cable that hauls them up

  like some kind of spiritual harness vanishes

  from sight. Their hooves pummel the heavy wind,

  and the earth they rode a thousand days or more

  falls away in hunks of brown and yellow.

  Even the weight of their bodies has abandoned them,

  but now they are the gods we always wanted:

  winged as any myth, strange, distant, real,

  and we will never be ourselves till they return.

  Old Men Playing Basketball

  The heavy bodies lunge, the broken language

  of fake and drive, glamorous jump shot

  slowed to a stutter. Their gestures, in love

  again with the pure geometry of curves,

  rise towards the ball, falter, and fall away.

  On the boards their hands and fingertips

  tremble in tense little prayers of reach

  and balance. Then, the grind of bone

  and socket, the caught breath, the sigh,

  the grunt of the body laboring to give

  birth to itself. In their toiling and grand

  sweeps, I wonder, do they still make love

  to their wives, kissing the undersides

  of their wrists, dancing the old soft-shoe

  of desire? And on the long walk home

  from the VFW, do they still sing

  to the drunken moon? Stands full, clock

  moving, the one in Army fatigues

  and houseshoes says to himself, pick and roll,

  and the phrase sounds musical as ever,

  radio crooning songs of love after the game,

  the girl leaning back in the Chevy’s front seat

  as her raven hair flames in the shuddering

  light of the outdoor movie, and now he drives,

  gliding toward the net. A glass wand

  of autumn light breaks over the backboard.

  Boys rise up in old men, wings begin to sprout

  at their backs. The ball turns in the darkening air.

  Old Women

  They of the trembling hands and liver spots

  like a map of Asia, far pale countries of the flesh

  wandering as their hands wandered beside me

  over texts of Ezekiel and Jeremiah to prophesy

  the blues and yellows of next summer’s swallowtails

  any Sunday morning in the First Methodist Church

  of Liberal, Kansas, where I, boy lepidopterist,

  future nomad of the lost countries of imagination,

  felt the hand on my wrist, the Black Sea of not forgetting.

  Mrs. Tate, for instance, stunning the dusty air

  with “Casta Diva” in the tar-paper shack’s backyard

  littered with lenses, trays, tripods, the rusted remains

  of camera equipment strewn with drunken care

  by her husband, artist and disciple of Lewis Hine,

  now failed in his craft but applauding his wife’s

  shrill arias Friday nights when the deaf town died

  to rise again on Sunday and a boy listened across

  the road to what might be, he thought, happiness.

  The nameless one, garbage picker, hag of the alleys,

  the town’s bad dream scavenging trash cans

  at 3 a.m. while I, sneaking from bed, edged closer

  in the shadows, and she in her legendary madness

  clawed through egg cartons, bottles, headless dolls.

  Junk madonna in a high school formal, she cried

  her lover’s name, turning then with outspread hands,

  reaching to hold my head against her hard breast,

  sour smell of old crinoline, the terror of love.

  And Miss Harp, bent over a cup of steaming tea,

  sipping a novel fat as Falstaff, wheezing, thick-lensed,

  sister of the holy order of spinster librarians,

  cousin to the brothers Karamazov and Becky Sharp.

  She called out my name, her piccolo voice doing

  scales, and handed me an armload of new arrivals:

  Doctor Zhivago, Kon-Tiki, A Boy’s Guide to Aeronautics.

  Her watery eyes bloomed, her quavering hand nudged

  my shoulder: Russia, adventure, the mystery of flight.

  Mazurkas drift down from the gazebo, troikas

  clatter along the dark avenues of Yalta lined with

  cypresses and firs. Behind a hedge of blackthorn

  we stroll the esplanade as a sexton tolls the bell

  of some distant church. Mrs. Tate unfurls her

  unnecessary parasol, and the librarian remarks

  the harsh ocean air that fogs the street lamps.

  A third woman takes my arm, humming lightly,

  smiling, her porcelain hand calm upon my wrist.

  Song

  Gesang ist Dasein.

  A small thing done well, the steel bit paring

  the cut end of the collar, lifting delicate

  blue spirals of iron slowly out of lamplight

  into darkness until they broke and fell

  into a pool of oil and water below.

  A small thing done well, my father said

  so often that I tired of hearing it and lost

  myself in the shop’s north end, an underworld

  of welders who wore black masks and stared

  through smoked glass where all was midnight

  except the purest spark, the blue-white arc

  of the clamp and rod. Hammers made dull tunes

  hacking slag, and acetylene flames cast shadows

  of men against the tin roof like great birds

  trapped in diminishing circles of light.

  Each day was like another. I stood beside him

  and watched the lathe spin on, coils of iron

  climbing into dusk, the file’s drone, the rasp,

  and finally the honing cloth with its small song

  of things done well that I would carry into sleep

  and dreams of men with wings of fire and steel.

  Bert Fairchild, 1906–1990

  Thermoregulation in Winter Moths

  How do the winter moths survive when other moths die? What enables them to avoid freezing as they rest, and what makes it possible for them to fly—and so to seek food and mates—in the cold?

  —BERNDT HEINRICH, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN

  1. The Himalayas

  The room lies there, immaculate, bone light

  on white walls, shell-pink carpet, and pale, too,

  are the wrists and hands of professors gathered

  in the outer hall where behind darkness

  and a mirror they can observe unseen.

  They were told: high in the Himalayas

  Buddhist monks thrive in subzero cold

  far too harsh for human life.
Suspended

  in the deep grace of meditation, they raise

  their body heat and do not freeze to death.

  So five Tibetan monks have been flown

  to Cambridge and the basement of Reed Hall.

  They sit now with crossed legs and slight smiles,

  and white sheets lap over their shoulders

  like enfolded wings. The sheets are wet,

  and drops of water trickle down the monks’

  bare backs. The professors wait patiently

  but with the widened eyes of fathers

  watching new babies in hospital cribs.

  Their aluminum clipboards rest gently

  in their laps, their pens are poised,

  and in a well-lit room in Cambridge

  five Tibetan monks sit under heavy wet sheets

  and steam begins to rise from their shoulders.

  2. Burn Ward

  My friend speaks haltingly, the syllables freezing

  against the night air because the nurse’s story

  still possesses him, the ease with which she tended

  patients so lost in pain, so mangled, scarred, and

  abandoned in some arctic zone of uncharted suffering

  that strangers stumbling onto the ward might

  cry out, rushing back to a world where the very air

  did not grieve flesh. Empathy was impossible,

  he said. A kind of fog or frozen lake lay between her

  and the patient, far away. Empathy was an insult,

  to look into the eyes of the consumed and pretend,

  I know. It must have been this lake, this vast

  glacial plain that she would never cross, where

  the patient waved in the blue-gray distance,

  alone and trembling the way winter moths tremble

  to warm themselves, while she stood, also alone

  and freezing, on the other side, it must have been

  this unbearable cold that made her drive straight home

  one day, sit down cross-legged in the center of

  an empty garage, pour the gasoline on like a balm,

  and calmly strike a match like someone starting

  a winter fire, or lost and searching in the frozen dark.

  Keats

  I knew him. He ran the lathe next to mine.

  Perfectionist, a madman, even on overtime