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[seamusd.livejournal.com]

David Rivard

1966

Innocence? Soon as you try putting your finger on it
it zips off, a blur, like a slot car
plastered with oil and tire company decals,
like the low-slung Formula One winners that two boys,
thirteen, race over banked curves
and flats colored the tarmac gray of thunder clouds --
a track the olive-skinned boy built to mimic
the Daytona Grand Prix. Cool basement air,
ozone rasp of electric motors;
they hunch juicing the cars with black joysticks.

Across the room under old magazines is a book.
But the dark kid -- he's pudgy, his mother says "baby fat" --
well, he can't decide to tell his friend
about it. And beneath this debate with himself
swim images of sullen fashion models
from the book's trashy, softcore, uptown romances.
Words, vaguely glamorous, like valium,
coitus interruptus, pouting girls, naked, half-naked,
all riding surging currents of possessiveness
or shame or ache until they fuse, inevitably,
into need. The need he feels, however
confusing, for secret. So that he bursts out, laughing,
punching, happily blaming the other boy
when, at a crisscross, their sleek racers smash up.

Later, his friend, a sandy-haired wiseass,
stands near the workbench littered by airplane kits,
plastic carcasses. He fiddles with a crimped tube of epoxy.
Hung on a string, a camouflage-
coated B-52 banks above his head. Above a valley
and burning trucks and bodies, fires blending with sunlight
while the sun passes on to the next wilderness or pasture.
And, if only to buy that last line,
two boys smear the inside of a Stop & Shop bag with glue.
All right, says one, stick your head in.
Doesn't the darker boy tip his face to the sack?
Soon his chubby little heart seems to slam
not just in his chest but within the dim bag,
as, each long breath, the bag collapses and swells,
as if his heart pleads to punch out an opening, a hole.
Soon it does, soon
the fragrant and careless light streams in.

(from Torque by David Rivard. University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988)