for David Tronzo
Listening to your slide guitar
I see my father gliding beside me
down the sidewalk on Kavanaugh Boulevard.
Little Rock summer at dusk, and I am six.
He holds my hand and speaks to me
of his teen days in Crossett,
how his mother made him stop boxing,
afraid he would kill the other guy.
He bends down to my height,
lets me rub my small hand against his cheek,
feel the pin-sized fragment of wood
beneath the skin, the old scar
almost invisible now.
He would not tell me then, or ever,
of the lumber mill’s thick, gagging air
or his father’s stern face,
the command to quit college,
to give up basketball
and return sad and beaten
to the suffocating saw.
He would leave it, years later,
for Odell Piercy to paint verbal portraits
of how Dad, passing the high-jump pit,
took off his shoes, and standing 5-11,
leaped 6-1 in blue jeans and bare feet.
How he would practice arcing the ball
over gym rafters, sinking baskets
to his teammates’ laughter. And his gall
of repeating the feat in games.
How he had been a better baseball pitcher,
until the muscle tore, than his brother Orville,
who, his one year with the Senators,
struck out Babe Ruth.
He rises, wraps his strong fingers
around my shoulder, and we walk on.
Soon we will be home, sitting with my mother,
sister Joan and brother Frank
in the front porch swing and summer chairs,
watching the cars grumble and lisp past
barely interrupting the heat-heavy, cricket-filled night.
He will smile, hand us a dollar bill,
so Frank and I can trot the block to Mr. Williams’s store.
We’ll buy ten-cent Cokes and chocolate milk.
Roger Armbrust
1995
