“Could you even do it now?” asks the other attorney.
The day proceeds. More trials, more hearings. The courthouse empties out. All the different worlds, here and everywhere around here, go into the early dark of the winter day. After rush hour, whether at the street corners where things happen and traffic goes steadily by, slowly, or at the safe corners where nothing should occur, the snow falling since the hour when the judge got up from his bench and left is making everything a little quieter. Lights and lamps and TVs, through the apartment and house windows of this neighborhood, throw a soft inadequate brightness into the streets. The avenue and streets intersecting near the front of the great building—its courtrooms, detention center cells, schoolrooms, offices, its bleak cafeteria for workers and visitors, the big foyer with metal detectors, the multistory garage—these thoroughfares lie in the strange, nighttime snow-light of streetlamps and headlights. There’s some quiet.
And inside the holding tank, there’s no one. And in the dining hall of the juvenile detention center, there’s no one. In the cells, it’s noisy. Boy children and some precocious men who are very young (and a few of the small number of girls and girl women) are in each other’s faces. Taunting. Pushing. Threatening. Threatened, pushed, taunted. Outside the dirty unbreakable windows, tall city buildings to the east are like rigid galaxies of costly light. Light snow is falling faintly through the abyss between here and there.
All-Out Effort
I have cleaned off the old radio and put new batteries in it. I have brought my old boots up from the basement and cleaned and polished them. I have brought the old rocker down from the attic and repaired the arm that was broken. I have washed and dried and ironed the old khaki pants and the old soft long-sleeved green shirt that have been hanging for so long at the back of the closet.
In the quiet time before the working day is going to end, out the kitchen door and on the back landing in the afternoon shade, three floors above the trash cans filled with this week’s garbage, I’ve put the rocker, I’ve set the radio down beside it and turned it on softly to the right music, I’m wearing the khakis and shirt and boots, I have sat down in the neighborhood.
To prepare myself, I brought back to mind one time when from a sidewalk at night we could see through windows the lights and motion of a brightly lit room crowded with people and no one could see us: that moment. I’ve recalled sitting at my desk in the attic and writing you a letter and the summer sweat dripping off me onto the paper.
I’ve brought back to mind the words I said to you at different times, and I’ve spoken them again to myself, wearing these same clothes that I wore in those days. I’ve begun to return to so many places where we breathed and lived and passed through. Often I have had lots of ideas and I started off with many thoughts, but not one of them was able to reach the end it might have headed for, or even a resting place on the way, or find what I wanted to discover that I felt I was after. Everything that was over was too far away. Even though I chose a summer day for this, or it chose me, I know this green shirt may not be warm enough when I’m crossing frozen fields and cold streets and shore hills of ice, or cool enough when I’m back in hot nights buzzing outside with cicadas and tree frogs, sirens and shouts and engines and shooting. Where I’m going, there will be hot sweaty rooms with shallow-breathing windows, there will be hurricane waters, cold winds will whistle through the cracks in me.
Like a long-legged river bird, I was wading but now I’m flying, I’m off, I’m headed back into places not of now, I can hardly hear the radio voices, a little wind of time is starting to whip my trouser legs and my sleeves and make my eyes smart. Let the tears come! This rocker is getting up some speed. I’m going back, I’m going to rescue at least a little of it!
Acknowledgments
Earlier versions of these stories have been published previously in American Poetry Review, The American Voice, Harper’s Magazine, Helicon, Missouri Review, North American Review, StoryQuarterly; in Five Pears or Peaches (Broken Moon Press), Slow Trains Overhead: Chicago Poems and Stories (University of Chicago Press), and in the anthologies Chicago Works (Morton Press), Vital Lines: Contemporary Fiction about Medicine (St. Martin’s Press); and have been broadcast on This American Life.
About the Author
Reginald Gibbons is the author of a novel, Sweetbitter (LSU Press); ten books of poems, most recently Last Lake (University of Chicago Press); a book about poetry, How Poems Think (University of Chicago Press); and many other works, including translations from Spanish and ancient Greek. His book Creatures of a Day (LSU Press) was a Finalist for the National Book Award in poetry. He taught for many years in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and is Frances Hooper Professor of Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University. From 2012 to early 2017, he was one of many who participated in creating the American Writers Museum (Chicago). He was born and raised in Houston, where he studied piano and clarinet and was thrown by horses, and then studied Spanish and creative writing at Princeton, and creative writing and comparative literature at Stanford.
BOA Editions, Ltd. American Reader Series
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Christmas at the Four Corners of the Earth
Prose by Blaise Cendrars
Translated by Bertrand Mathieu
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Pig Notes & Dumb Music: Prose on Poetry
By William Heyen
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After-Images: Autobiographical Sketches
By W. D. Snodgrass
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Walking Light: Memoirs and Essays on Poetry
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To Sound Like Yourself: Essays on Poetry
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You Alone Are Real to Me: Remembering Rainer Maria Rilke
By Lou Andreas-Salomé
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Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee
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I Carry A Hammer In My Pocket For Occasions Such As These
By Anthony Tognazzini
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Unlucky Lucky Days
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Glass Grapes and Other Stories
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Meat Eaters & Plant Eaters
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On the Winding Stair
By Joanna Howard
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Cradle Book
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In the Time of the Girls
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This New and Poisonous Air
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To Assume a Pleasing Shape
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The Innocent Party
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Passwords Primeval: 20 American Poets in Their Own Words
Interviews by Tony Leuzzi
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The Era of Not Quite
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The Winged Seed: A Remembrance
By Li-Young Lee
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Jewelry Box: A Collection of Histories
By Aurelie Sheehan
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The Tao of Humiliation
By Lee Upton
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Bridge
By Robert Thomas
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Reptile House
By Robin McLean
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The Education of a Poker Player
James McManus
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Remarkable
By Dinah Cox
No. 27
Gravity Changes
By Zach Powers
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My House Gathers Desires
By Adam McOmber
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An Orchard in the Street
By Reginald Gibbons
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An Orchard in the Street Page 9
