B. H. Fairchild

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 toward 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.

I am so young that I am still in love with Battle Creek, Michigan: decoder rings, submarines powered by baking soda, whistles that only dogs can hear. Actually, not even them. Nobody can hear them. Mrs. Hill from next door is hammering on our front door shouting, and my father in his black and gold gangster robe lets her in trembling and bunched up like a rabbit in snow pleading,oh I’m so sorry, so sorry, so sorry,

As a kid sitting in a yellow vinyl booth in the back of Earl’s Tavern, you watch the late-afternoon drunks coming and going, sunlight breaking through the smoky dark as the door opens and closes, and it’s the future flashing ahead like the taillights of a semi as you drop over a rise in the road on your way to Amarillo, bright lights and blonde-haired women, as Billy used to say, slumped over his beer like a snail,make a real man out of you

All things fall away: store fronts on the west, ANGEL’S DELICATESSEN, windows boarded and laced in day-glow, BLUE KNIGHT AUTO REPAIR to the north with its verandah of rusted mufflers and hubcaps of extinct Studebakers. The diminishing neighborhood sprawls under dusty folds of sycamore and fading elm, the high birdhouse out back starling-haunted. Inside the cottage a bay window translates the language of sunlight, flaring like baroque trumpets on the red carpet, shadow-dappled as the house turns slowly beneath the drift of tree branch and sun. We have come to shroud the couch in plastic, spread sheets over the fat reading chair and the piano’s mahogany gloom, the impossible etude’s blur of black notes. Among a turmoil of ungraded papers lies the Loeb Classics Aeneid open to the last lesson. Later in the bedroom we imagine a flourish of light, her husband loosening the sash of her white silk robe, his beard brushing the back of her neck. Amores, the art of love, of words lifting like vapors on a cold day, the dense vowels of Ovid and Virgil almost vanished, almost risen to music. We lock the heavy door and walk away from the silence, the lone hexameters of Dido pulsing in an empty house.

In the early stages of epilepsy there occurs a characteristic dream .... One is somehow lifted free of one’s own body; looking back one sees oneself and feels a sudden, maddening fear; another presence is entering one’s own person, and there is no avenue of return. —George Steiner Outside my window the wasps are making their slow circle, dizzy flights of forage and return, hovering among azaleas that bob in a sluggish breeze this humid, sun-torn morning. Yesterday my wife held me here as I thrashed and moaned, her hand in my foaming mouth, and my son saw what he was warned he might. Last night dreams stormed my brain in thick swirls of shame and fear. Behind a white garage a locked shed full of wide-eyed dolls burned, yellow smoke boiling up in huge clumps as I watched, feet nailed to the ground. In dining cars white table cloths unfolded wings and flew like gulls. An old German in a green Homburg sang lieder,Mein Herz ist müde. In a garden in Pasadena my father posed in Navy whites while overhead silver dirigibles moved like great whales. And in the narrowing tunnel of the dream’s end I flew down onto the iron red road of my grandfather’s farm. There was a white rail fence. In the green meadow beyond, a small boy walked toward me. His smile was the moon’s rim. Across his egg-shell eyes ran scenes from my future life, and he embraced me like a son or father or my lost brother.

In his fifth year the son, deep in the backseat of his father’s Ford and the mysterium of time, holds time in memory with words, night, this night, on the way to a stalled rig south of Kiowa Creek where the plains wind stacks the skeletons of weeds on barbed-wire fences and rattles the battered DeKalb sign to make the child think of time in its passing, of death. Cattle stare at flat-bed haulers gunning clumps of black smoke and lugging damaged drill pipe up the gullied, mud-hollowed road.Road, this road

Like the blue angels of the nativity, the museum patrons hover around the art historian, who has arrived frazzled and limp after waking late in her boyfriend’s apartment. And here, she notes,the Procession of St. Gregory, where atop Hadrian’s mausoleum the angel of death returns his bloody sword to its scabbard

Elliot Ray Neiderland, home from college one winter, hauling a load of Herefords from Hogtown to Guymon with a pint of Ezra Brooks and a copy of Rilke’s Duineser Elegien