The Turn

Back home, the cornbread and
collards cook upstairs, smelling
of years ago, purifying
the black basement air
up our noses in a high.
You pack the pool balls together
into the rack, cracking them
like they were bones and your whack
would free a dream holed up inside.
I break the balls, then inhale--
the pattern in the air so
poised, it shows the shape from
our young selves to this new now
that we've become that
peers back here at what we were.
Coltrane on the stereo snorts
the dream of his last album
into notes--Offering, Expression.
We share my Schlitz and talk how
everybody from the old neighborhood
is stricken with the wages from
working in this reservation
where every brother is afflicted
in the man's mental jail
because we end up buying his shit:
the Jheri curl, the crossover
step that the ten percent do,
the failures to make community,
the sad marriages, the visionless
work, the nothing to look forward to
living that we all stand in line to do.

But here the room is tranced now,
the sweetsmell of leftovers heating upstairs.
Across the table from me my same
brown muscles etched newer
on my brother's arms, the same sweatshirt
heartbeat rolling back the sleeves.
Now the balls spread out in stars'
patterns, a moving sublime.
The black ball is like a coal
I wish I could squeeze down
beyond a coal to make a crystal,
be the shell that would hold
my reflection there, then be
the seeing from the reflection
that looks with curiosity back at me.
We listen--the purging amidst
the chaos in Coltrane is being
a steadfast improvisation to
silencing this reservation time.
Birth, death, the ephemeral:
Breath breathed into a story
that tells us we are lives
just for its vanishing season.
Now you break the stillness of four balls
bunched near the far pocket, a geometry
selflessly unfolding.
Then like someone going away,
or a wise child on his birthday
seeing himself as candle
lit and blown out and lit
again each year, you pass
the cue to me and motion it's my go;
the roll of your shot still gliding.

In this moment we imagine
we are the motion of these spheres.
Their perfect whirl is living.
For a moment I go backwards, wishing
I could see my original growing up
again. For a moment I expect to find
the spirit here that was there
in illo tempore. For a moment I expect
to resurrect the passing through whose proof was
a period used up in time. For a moment
while the nothing comes I am nothing
till I purge the past from this taking place
that is me--the present depository:
the sound of Coltrane scaling
the upper range of a wall in the dark.
My body is this room crowded
with the image of this room.
Above the table the light bulb
swings in vanishing arcs
where you've brushed it
waving the tip of the cue.
Now the egg-shaped shadows
beneath the balls swing in response,
picking up the oblong signals
from this low-watt light. We watch
like we don't care, Coltrane's thinking
is the sound of a big wheel
spun around so perfectly
it is a moon orbiting itself.
In shifting light we ebb and surge
and surge and break in grin
when the black ball misses the hole.
Hearing that upstairs dinner is done
moves us to a different mode.
And we laugh at this game.

Chris Gilbert is the author of Across the Mutual Landscape (Graywolf Press), which received the 1983 Walt Whitman Award.

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