-excerpt from Abacus of Ordinary Things
Two Country Boys At Flight
Once
Alit, my brother and I built our speed from wood and wheel and hammered it clacking,
Pulley’d up a hill strung higher than the gawking birds judging upon wires
Excited as much from ambition as gradient,
Until the breath excited from anticipatory plunge counted and we gulped before the striding
And then it came, the leap--
Wheel’d bellies past the cows grazing as blurry smudges lowered in the salt-block built valley,
And we cantered wobbly and algebraically awkward, spinning and depth-dropping
Until, like Icarus, we had shot ourselves out into the air,
The rise below rocketing shadow and shorn, darting toward our reckless falling
And the mirage of home shot across our vision and tumbling bodies wobbled by a patchworked wheel,
Cowlicked cheeks, abrazed palms, creek-soaked limbs and some giddy hope reaching outward
Over the pitched gravel and all we had earlier imagined:
Of the air, of the parabola of the soft dent in the hill, of the me carving into you
And there we went flying, defiant of gravity and any worked-out grace,
The goodness and care our parents had little clue was under assault in the tumbling--
These children, if not disruptors then what to make of their alignment and daring?--
Until
That one misaligned, barnacled moment caught upon the ambition of two restless brothers
Came clicking like a marble beside the acrobatic skidding,
The stone-tip, the wiggled and the wearied, the physics of a road, speed and impatient daring.
And so we went away, for an instant,
(Count it as your own)
My brother and I shot out along the dampened macadam, ochre with the splintered wood falling away
And the skin peels slowly blackening from the pavement's tar
The giddy bodies' blood and scraped toss
Left momentarily imprinted upon a warm country road
And then the rest, abrupt in its unexpectedness,
Wings burned and bent against the mirroring waves mirage'd in the summer swelter.
A forlorn bend in the land, an aching pasture of geography, full and complete,
And two country boys suddenly
Stopped.
Flight and filament broken by rust and rain long before that clear, resplendent afternoon flagged:
An old dream dislodged, our broken laughter level to the distance,
We tossed about as hope, gambled our fading as flight
And then the cicadas prattling and the spun shoe laces and the dragging for an instant the beat of
their two hearts.
An old, manufactured board dislodged from the corner of a cobwebbed farmhouse,
An older calculus,
Aswirl and ascending.
And that is all it took, you know. The Tick. The Tact,
The mess and the flight, turbined and yelping.
All it took, all of sudden taken back, was
Those two country boys,
(brothers pivoting),
Galloping their bodies against one another and between the day,
And the going, as I know you know,
set loose.
Later,
Tins and kettles and rain and harnesses: knees and elbows peeled back as old school curtains
Between time and a splintered cantilever of a dare that led to
their ambitions turned upon a triangular spit.
The incandescent,
The hill rising,
The sky descending in tumbolt, as they loosened all things
A chamber of sitting moments,
The lexical makeup of the moving,
The syntax of the clipped—the knees bruised, the sky flecked by your spinning
The catacomb of settled things,
Do you recall our unbuckling?
And so we went,
Our mad boy-made galloping
A place's mad pressing and the pulling we were set upon
So long ago,
And now in the cartwheel of your son’s spinning past the open door,
And my own's scampering over a vocabulary richer then both of what we could have imagined.
Is it not understood as such?
Long ago, that Summer day where we both loved and lost for a moment our own spent bodies
And caught in each other's eyes, and unkempt extremities fallen, the embarrassment of a shared lapse and
bruised ambition
For much later we understood the recklessness that had set up the winding
Blessed and fortunate and yet unremarkable
And what it came down to was that
Once,
Brothers bruised and basic had
Set off in the white August day
And the rest had
Begun.
for: Damon, Dima and Nate
