(i) the Winnipeg hair
Combing it up like Charlie Rayner then,
New York’s “custodian of the twine,” swooping it
high in the front and over and out with it wet, the Winnipeg
quick-set, 30 below. His waiting friends with similar promontories.
Thin jackets. Backs to the wind like a choir.
You’d see the hair flash past above the boards,
big waves in the sun, one breaking into the clear, the others
in sleek pursuit. Looked like the ocean rolling in.
(ii) spectators
Seventeen and off to the six bright cities.
Those twelve-dollar shoes that caught his eye in Galt
on the way, two-toned, their breezy angle of display. Spectators.
Shoes for those who discriminate. Well, what to make of that, catching
his image in the glass, the North End slouch, the Slavic darkness
of his eyes. Black cats on polish cans looked out at him
identically. Shoes to make the man.
And shielding his eyes against the window’s glare,
missed, for the first time in his life,
the first spit of snow in the air.
Two bucks down, two more each week
out of the twenty they gave him. Fourteen for room
and board left six. But something must have happened
the day he wore them home—he’d let some easy ones in,
or maybe just a goalie’s mood. Maybe someone nudged a friend
in passing, wise to the shoes and showy hair, the hint of Asia
in his bones. Still, he’d been so careful coming home,
those wings like an angel, surely they’d lift
his heart they looked so fine, but never
to wear them again,
not once.
And being born in 1929.
A taxi into the tunnel from Windsor, tapping
at tail lights dropping into the loop, up and into the scissoring
long black legs and American air. Blink by St Leo’s Virgin,
her eyes cast down, concealing what she knows
of good beginnings.
Down Grande River to the Barn,
Detroit’s Olympia, the sleet off the river
bricked out, the basking fans in the heat and smoke
of fat cigars. You let a soft one in you hear them
bitch and groan. Hey bring back Lumley.
Bring up Hall.
Not long before the hair was gone.
All of it off.
The heat and murder in his crease, he said.
The jeers and sneers was what he meant. Mouths like fish
against the glass. Spectators. Jesus. How long would you take
to hate them? All of it off.
And darkened his looks from lying awake,
or brooding apart in bars. The disappeared sleep, the ban
on food from home, pirogies and kasha, potatoes in heavy cream
and cheese, and sleep, oh sleep, and the haunting eyes
of Richard, this time charging out into the fray
and catching the son of a bitch before he could shoot.
Or choking over the coached apology, that weasel reporter
he’d pinned to the wall with a skate.
All of which emphasized his Ukrainian bones.
But man, that wave in the days of his rampant expectation,
man, you could have surfed that thing.