Independence Day, 1990
Tom Haffner
Three buses:
79th to Western, Western to 35th,
35th down to the Comiskey.
The parish boundaries long faded,
useless as the railroad tracks now ordained
to herd the urban prairie.
My shirt sticks to the seat.
A drop of sweat rolls off my forehead
in a perfect circle on Bigger.
I could hear them frown when I called,
I could hear them frown as St. Kilian’s
converts from Catholic to Baptist.
I try to explain it all: the neighborhoods,
the languages and dialects, the work in the warehouse,
sweating off dissolution, rebuilding the self,
But college is far from here,
and it’s the same as always:
No map could provide grounds as to why I go.
* * *
This team, too.
Years of public failure
cleansed. Something is restored.
Cleansed and restored,
we go through this together,
no one to witness this but us
Three buses:
79th to Western, Western to 35th,
35th down to the Comiskey.
The parish boundaries long faded,
useless as the railroad tracks now ordained
to herd the urban prairie.
My shirt sticks to the seat.
A drop of sweat rolls off my forehead
in a perfect circle on Bigger.
I could hear them frown when I called,
I could hear them frown as St. Kilian’s
converts from Catholic to Baptist.
I try to explain it all: the neighborhoods,
the languages and dialects, the work in the warehouse,
sweating off dissolution, rebuilding the self,
But college is far from here,
and it’s the same as always:
No map could provide grounds as to why I go.
* * *
This team, too.
Years of public failure
cleansed. Something is restored.
Cleansed and restored,
we go through this together,
no one to witness this but us
posted by David Schaafsma @ 2:07 PM
1 Comments:
At 2:27 PM,
David Schaafsma said…
I like this a lot. It layers the complexity of growing up with growing with a team, and the pain of all that is clear from this one, the hard work, the commitment. I love the opening, with the buses (okay, the pink line now, Wendy, but this is 1990, old school commitment).
Second stanza has that feel of decay, of loss.
Bigger, from Native Son. Complex, maybe? Not sure what it means.
I like the details like the short sticking.
Intrigued about who the "they" are, but from subsequent stanzas it's people who don't get the south side, and going through this process of relating to others outsdie that world.
I like the "No map" line a lot, weaves you and the team histories together.
You don't need "this team, too" I think, since we get that.
Something moving about this poem. Some very powerful images.
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