Blackbird ArchiveSkating Waitress at the Circle Drive-in
We’re grandparents now. Then bright steel fins lined up, all
the fathers waiting to die in wing chairs at home. The beat
oozed from open car window to car window, each bearing
a tray the waitress tilts and locks. Then a hand slides out
dropping change as she twirls, who’s also dead, her flying
ponytail electric, and just then the pink Cadillac, and the black
faces as glass smoothes slowly down, smoke hazing inside.
That’s all it takes. I can hear knuckles crack, the words
like flecks of spit in summer air, like looping bats visible
in high moth-swirls of light. But nothing happened the way
everybody thinks. Milkshakes gone, we slumped, unbuckled,
cruised the river’s salt marsh, boats fishing where it’s lonelier
than we knew, some asleep on deck, maybe learning how
beautiful shore lights are. Soon a girl slips off a pink sweater
where we’ve pulled in to park. We don’t expect headlights,
so many cars, guys piling out for the fight, one bleeding
on the warm Oldsmobile. Tomorrow I’ll wax my dad’s Ford,
drag the old mower over wasps, shoot baskets with anybody
every small body struck turned to goo I’d never get off.
If I tell you I’m watching TV’s b-ball, I’m watching him
watch me watching the dark, a man surely alive as I am.
Who never was stabbed, or struck, or rose up to say
“Fuck you” to that ass skating away, to her pimply cheeks
sucking in, out, to the gum-chew, rat-hair the sailors cried for.
