Robert Lietz
An Upstate Childhood
The sea was never close, though fresh water set up
nearby in imitation, when swimming meant mostly
that heart-shaped, scalloped, conch-minded city pool, or
the Olympic-measured substitute the city blessed kids’
summers by, upslope, just a little, below the round-tops,
with an ocean reserved for later still, a singularity,
not to be missed, only after years and miles had prepared us,
and roles we imagined for ourselves, as if to explain
how land around, the tablet sea might catalyze, beyond
the mere admission or predicting, or even the way
we had of speaking then, of responding, so that the summer
begins to exist as metaphor, explored, from that cross
trafficked upstate place, or from these heartland spaces
that leave us rounding off the numbers, this fondness
say, for the straightest measured places, for convenience
forever salted with misgivings, whatever there was
to fight or flee, if only grade school, or a grandmother’s
declining, the fear you could disappoint an island-raised
Franciscan sister, beginning to see how planes prepared
with friends in a nun’s absence could be flown once
or make a kid seem criminal, in a moment caught, when she,
you could swear, materialized before you, with only
the memory of that, and classes skipped, with an equally
woeful partner, of routes west, and kids, seven and eight,
on a post-lunch, pre-Kerouac adventure, that pilgrimage
of sorts through pre-interstate America, inspired by comics
and first TVs, and haunted for decades by the escapade’s
retelling, by that reunion-conscripted principal, her fellows,
by sea, symphony, and any of the zillion projects kids
gave into, reading for weeks, come again to some bright
Tuesday on a porch-swing, or risking the thorned edges
of a city yard turned gridiron, where football satisfied alike anticipation, and the usual parochial disappointment
with a season. Thorns, you could say, were just a start on
risks we might be tried by, sprinting, as agreed, on three,
and cutting left, with maybe a foot or so for safety, finding
a football there to catch, when legs and arms owned
distances, a tackle at the same edge could mean another
take on facing danger, or anyplace near the latticed
post-supported arbor end-zone, at the hedged far end of
playing space, that three foot garage-backed break
a boy could leap into, to come away with a completion,
finessing the local rules, geometry, and every sentence
complications asked you to remember, that momentum
kids would grow up from, through summers they
could not be done with fast enough.
