FOOSBALL

 

Sometime during the night -- tall, silent trees still

breathing the lingering heat of daylight --

my older brother and his high school friend released

the unattended foosball table from the confines

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.

SPARRING

 

My young hands are slow, hopelessly so, hardly

equipped for the instinctual jab and reach

required for this dance; my flat feet, likewise, reluctant

to lift themselves from the cool kitchen linoleum.

This is as close as we will get to an embrace,

my brother and I, the palms of his hands held out

toward me, waving, circling, shifting the air between us,

hands which look like larger versions of my own.

Still in high school, he proudly wears his silver satin

jacket from the White Bear Lake Boxing Club,

the rust-colored spatters of blood, who knows whose,

along its front and arms a badge of honor.

"Protect your head," he reminds me, repeating it,

having twice had his own nose broken of late.

This is the true gospel he is preaching,

fire and brimstone in each of his teenage fists,

where all of his sorrow, anger, and betrayal entwine,

speaking with blunt certainty all that he cannot;

and though I flinch, I know that he would not hit me

in the face, not intentionally, but merely brushes

against my cheek slightly, delicately, my periphery

catching only the blur of sudden motion, of autumn light

shifting through the broken branches of trees,

the movement of human or animal already gone,

just to show that he can, just to remind me

how quickly things can come at you in this life,

and how quickly they can all just disappear.