Bless Mark Hopkins soul for wanting to publish this in the Cleveland Reader, while his dratted foil (okay, Nick's a cool guy too) passed it over. I remember things like this to the minutest detail. I can tell you how it felt to be there. this happened circa -- 29 years ago, written four years ago.
The kid had skipped out of practice
and had just arrived, halfway through, out of uniform.
But with one sentence to coach Terrengo,
all was forgotten.
“There’s a girl choking by the lower field.”
We had never seen coach T. run,
let alone run so fast.
He was a huge guy, in height weight and muscle.
He just flew down that hill
and the other coaches managed to keep us up there
until everything was alright.
We followed down then
to find her on a bench,
turning back from blue to peach,
coach T. standing next to her.
The story was that he’d
Heimliched a piece of gum from her throat.
The next day,
I looked over at her a couple of times
in Spanish class.
She sat there in a grey sweatshirt,
and I remember noticing how frail
and, for the first time,
how pretty she looked.
The drone of Ms. Coffey’s voice
hovered over the room,
odd and dull,
while Ginny gave off this aura of humility,
real and palpable,
as if she knew something
it would take years and years
for any of us
to understand.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
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1 comment:
That's a very moving poem. Amazing the things we can remember with such detail. Congratulations on the publication.
By the way, all of my work is pen and ink. My printmaking professor freaked when he found out. He said I was doing everything backwards. Haha. Instead of taking a drawing and making it a print, I was making prints into drawings.
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