Designed for Flight: Poems

The Great Northeast

5 The Great Northeast If they still botch grammar in Northeast Philly, Lord, let’s leave it that way, at least on the corner where Givens Market sat on its thumb. The door sign lacked possessive punctuation, belying the trove inside: musks of garlic and armpits, towers of powdered milk, deviled ham. Eight to eight, the storefront gaped from thick glass blocks—6 x 6 inch cubes frozen by fire— at the joust of Howard and West Courtland, jostle of white kids and black, almost guiltless indigents and Rizzo’s thugs. Pimpled, scrawny, greasy-haired, I would palm a Red Delicious then scurry home to sprawl in my parents’ bed and marvel as the Broad Street Bullies bloodied ice on a black-and-white no larger than lunch— just as I had opened for the fuzzy tube to feed me Vietnam, toy-sized soldiers scudding brush. Mrs. Given lisped, her husband hauled on his back a lump absurd as the acorn squash that never sold, and I—surrogate boy, sweet un-son, given to unctuousness and theft—bagged and shelved to the FM spilling Baby, how long 6 will you keep me in the penalty box? The Cup that year stayed home, so number 8 kept crooning. It strikes me now my father, whose take-home every month went straight to banks, might have trilled the same refrain, only Baby would call up men in worsted suits— as in, Yeah, Baby, like that, do me like that. This, understand, well before I scanned anything but “The Raven” and “The Road Not Taken,” flubbed by nuns, but sweet Son of Man, I see today: if a hockey enforcer like Dave “The Hammer” Schultz could belt out public song, why couldn’t I—if only from the smooth white rink of a page? And if the evening star were a tooth punched clean from the mouth of Billy Penn poised atop City Hall, if my soft employers survived the Hat Trick Reich, were given a second chance to sniff cantaloupes for ripeness, what could it matter to skip an apostrophe that lisps I own this, this is mine? Better to go on dredging years in flour, serve up something in truth and barely claim it. Even if it’s a fist to the lip of Denis Potvin or a store’s hand-lettered sign. Why else did the glaciers open envelopes of stone? So we could read time’s invitation 7 and answer with an ardent Yes, I shall attend. Why else would Mrs. Given press a twenty in my palm at Christmas, a holy day for which she could not bend? No wonder they call it The Great Northeast. No wonder at all. Old neighborhood, I spit this on the ice for you. ...