AFTER THE MATINEE
by Bill Tremblay
Is there one place I can go
that always lifts my heart?
Yes, I’m sitting at the kitchen table
of the first floor apartment
in the triple-decker at the end of Wardwell Court
with sundown spreading its golden syrup
through the elms of an August evening
as my father smokes
a Pall Mall and sighs thinking of his
father dead alone in Worcester’s skid row
“from exposure,” he says. “To what?” I ask
in the always-present. He crushes his stub.
“Can Billy come out?” Kenny asks
through the screen window. Everyone’s there:
Stashu, Dizzy, Bernie, Kenny, Leo, the two Carols.
“Can I?” “You and your gang going to terrorize
the neighborhood?” I can tell he’s teasing.
The screen door slaps behind me
as I jump off the porch. We walk up the alley
between tenements singing “Around her neck,
she wore a yellow ribbon,” and then louder,
“When I asked her
why the yellow ribbon she said
it’s for my lover who is far far away…”
singing as if we knew what wearing a ribbon
feels like as we float into the elm grove
our baseball diamond,
up the outfield where Stashu will always
shoot an arrow in my shoulder and the scar
will always mark that moment as we go past
old lady Guardino’s and we sing past
the Fong house and circle the neighborhood
like a cavalry patrol in a John Ford movie.
That’s what keeps me going
when things go south:
kids singing as the stars come out.
And mothers calling us home
on account of darkness.