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Two Bikers Embrace on Broad Street
Maybe, since you're something like me, you, too, would've nearly driven into oncoming traffic for gawking at the clutch between the two men on Broad Street, in front of the hospital, which would not stop, each man's face so deeply buried in the other's neck--these men not, my guess, to be fucked with--squeezing through that first, porous layer of the body into the heat beneath; maybe you, too, would've nearly driven over three pedestrians as your head swiveled to lock on their lock, their burly fingers squeezing the air from the angels on the backs of their denim jackets which reminds you the million and one secrets exchanged in nearly the last clasp between your father and his brother, during which the hospital's chatter and rattle somehow fell silent in deference to the untranslatable song between them, and just as that clasp endured through what felt like the gradual lengthening of shadows and the emergence of once cocooned things, and continues to this day, so, too, did I float unaware of the 3000 lb machine in my hands drifting through a stop light while I gawked at their ceaseless cleave going deeper, and deeper still, so that Broad Street from Fairmount to the Parkway reeked of the honey-scented wind pushed from the hummingbirds now hovering above these two men, sweetening, somehow, the air until nectar, yes, nectar gathered at the corners of my mouth like sun-colored spittle, the steel vehicle now a lost memory as I joined the fire-breasted birds in listening to air exchanged between these two men, who are, themselves, listening, forever, to the muscled contours of the other's neck, all of us still, and listening, as if we had nothing to blow up, as if we had nothing to kill.
Ross Gay
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:hi:
RL
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