Sometime during the night -- tall, silent trees still
breathing the lingering heat of daylight --
my older brother and his high school friend released
of the White Bear Lake Yacht Club, where Scott and Zelda
once whiled away their early days, their smart
summer whites billowing like sails against the blue,
like all those blank pages waiting patiently to be filled.
But my brother, in his cut-off jeans and rust-colored
tank top, would not have been thinking of this;
nor would he have considered the first quick sketches
of this game on a matchbox in some British pub,
nor the poet who perfected it so that the children of
the Spanish Civil War could still know laughter and play.
He would have been walking calmly, deliberately,
laughing, I suspect, under his breath with his buddy,
up the four long blocks to our falling-down house
with its equally falling-down porch and garage,
his dying car on makeshift blocks beside it.
He might have reminded himself, as he often did
to me, not to run or look afraid. To be cool.
The next day he polished it the way he polished
that car, a kind of blessing, and we played
outside on our uneven patch of lawn, islands
of dry dirt on either side, bright sun shining down
upon us, and our newly acquired pitch of green;
and for one brief moment, the day, the neighborhood,
if not the world itself, belonged to us alone,
as we spun those black handles into a steady blur,
breaking our own rule, showing off, just to see
who could hit the hardest into that narrow goalpost,
its white plastic ball echoing, even now.
