Designed for Flight: Poems

The Theft

16 The Theft A few weeks into first semester at the central Pennsylvania college I partied myself out of in less than a year, I stole my roommate’s girlfriend with a kiss one starless night outside our dorm— or put more truly, she threw a leg across and borrowed me, like an unchained bike, to ride away from him. Even though she dropped me, too, not long after—or let’s say she leaned me gently against a tree—it nags me to this day that he packed for the family farm, never returned. Thirty years and still I picture him behind the wheel (sky the color of denim, horses in the distance, grazing on the distance), cursing me every mile from school to home. Her name was Judy, his, Eric, I can’t remember mine. I can call up little more than ramen soups, stacked higher than books on our shelves, the guitar I picked at all the time, a musical scab, and his scuffed-up golf clubs in the corner (he’d made the team with ease). He scrawled ASSHOLE in Magic Marker on my book bag before he left, and of course I couldn’t blame him but blamed him all the same, 17 telling the guys on the floor what a rube he was, a yokel, until he entered our collective memory, then our communal forgetting. Judy, I have no doubt, runs a law firm now, her dark eyes trained on justice, and some nights, awake in bed, I think of Eric as a tall, thick-wristed kid just out of high school, who could drive a tractor, track a deer, and knock a golf ball farther than any man for a hundred miles. In my dream for him, he keeps his feelings locked inside a cabin in the woods, but lets them out at last—stunned and blinking— when he meets the perfect woman (what would you say?) working the ticket booth at a summer fair. But other times, when dreams won’t do, I fear he married the girl he took to prom. They get on fine, steadily if blandly, raise some kids, until the day the vision returns, and Eric sees himself at the second-story window, peering down at Judy and me, leaning close. That’s when, in disgust, he grits his teeth and throws a hand in the air, dismissing the life he chose with the gesture of a golfer tossing up a pinch of grass to test the inclination of the wind. ...