All my life I’ll know this restless tilt of eyes,
the upward glance before you get set, how much
time to save your skin.
Begins in school the trouble
with time. Winter’s bright brief days, but afternoons
that never seem to end. The black hand’s gloom.
No lights on the North End rinks, they let us
get into our gear at lunch for the game after school.
We pretend not to notice—what’s the big deal, sharpen
a pencil in shoulder pads, sing for your music mark
in your jock. The nervous scratch of pens as we wait our turn
for the music test. Kshuba glances up again, come on,
come on you clock, and sags when he hears Miss Nelson call his name,
though she was never one to joke about our names.
And this was a day she wore the famous blouse.
Dip the nib and scrawl of hoops while we wait,
diminishing O’s, tortured over what to sing and where,
standing by your desk or up at hers, she gave you that. Kshuba’s
crumpling number as he bends toward her ear. The pens stop.
“Listen,” Eileen Chalkman whispers. “It’s God Save the Queen.”
Miss Nelson glances at the class, the giggling stopped cold
by the look in her eyes, winter butterflies.
Hardly more than a murmur, his painful groping
for the tune, his voice rising, descending to a moan.
Kshuba, who never hears a word of English in his home,
whose one big fear is looking like a fool.
“Send her victorious hoppy and glorious.”
A suicidal wheezing in the room.
Stifled hysteria. Loyal team-mates too.
On the ice you pay the price. And he went after everyone
that afternoon, hogged the puck, pounded Gordie Biggar
up against the boards, and bit the referee. “Okay Okay, ” he says,
walking home, “I should sing for her Farmer by a Rock?
Sergeant Hooper’s Troopers?”
We cut across the vacant lot,
heading for the cooking smells we knew,
the woodsmoke hanging over clapboard houses
in the cold, twelve years old and troubled by our difficult names
and dreams (the blouse that made your hair stand up).
Shuffling along in his gear and galoshes, he starts
singing Sergeant Hooper’s Troopers. We sing it together,
not the brassy mocking way we belt it out in the dressing room,
unnerving the other team, but slow and sad like lonely riders
with their cattle in the rain, or cousins on barren farms
in the old country, imagining our green
and perfect garden.