Mark Leigh GibbonsNeddie Bradshawwears his T-shirts inside-out; guards the dock, patrols the harbor even when it's frozen over. Cavorts with children in the water, lets them stand on his shoulders. Neddie never misses sunset, stares at stars. Big kids shun him, and they wonder how it happened. Neddie accidentally jibed while racing . . . boom smashed his head in. Only twelve, very handsome, tawny tan, blonde crew cut he returned from treatment with a dented forehead. Brothers helped him, Neddie bit them. For years he sat watching the tide come in and out never speaking. Then he started raking all summer, beaches, lawns, even the dock float. Now Neddie rows around the harbor reporting speed offenders; he talks he laughs scaring newcomers into "speaking to someone" about him. But Neddie's known to be quite harmless. Sometimes Neddie appears at parties. Standing alone, out of the light. Never drinking always staring, still good-looking but sloppy in a frightening manner, he speaks about tide charts or phases of the moon. His brothers introduce him to tipsy girl outsiders. Neddie leads them to the stables; they return alone, hay in their hair. Neddie goes to sleep quite early.  when he was almost fourteen. Reading books when he should have been trying out for little league or jogging and acting less like a sissy. He hadn't even started dating girls, and his father had screwed the maid three times by the time he was twelve. Bradly, in his father's eyes, just didn't measure up, what with his pants belted too high and his horn-rimmed glasses and his vinyl breast pocket liner to keep his collection of ballpoint pens from staining his shirts. So the summer after his freshman year at Milton, Dad sent Bradly to Outward Bound in Maine. It cost four thousand bucks to have Bradly sleep on a canvas tarp and eat milk weed buds, poke weed, fiddleheads and sea urchin roe. Dad heard from the program director that Bradly had been caught jerking off with a black kid on a scholarship from the South Bronx. He thought it a good sign. "At least the kid has discovered his prick," Dad wrote back. Bradly had to stay in the woods for three whole days with nothing but a canvas tarp, Swiss army knife, and a bottle of Cutter insect repellent. But he snuck out three packets of Pop Rocks which he mixed with spring water to give him a little buzz. He made a fishing hook out of the tab of his fly and for this act of outdoorsy imagination won the Outward Bound Survival Bronze Medal for the summer. He told the prize committee he cooked the sunfish he caught with a fire he set by rubbing the obligatory sticks together, wrapping the fish in sassafras leaves and laying them on a flat stone. But actually he ate the fish raw . . . a taste he acquired from his parents' Japanese cook the year his father was selling software for IBM in Kobe. The fly tab fish hook was his hard evidence. They swallowed that. (In case you're wondering, the First Survival Prize went to a Mexican Kid who lit his fire by focusing the sun's rays through a contact lens.) During the seamanship part of the program a kid drowned after the lifeboat they'd launched in the surf capsized. Outward Bound refunded the full four thousand dollars to his grateful parents even though there were only three days left in the program when the kid was swept away. Bradly survived it all, and his dad thinks the world of him now. His mother cries occasionally when she drinks her martinis and starts to think of the danger they'd put Bradly in. Stewart, his younger brother, idolizes Bradly, who now wears aviator glasses. He wants to go Outward Bound as soon as he old enough. Everybody's vaguely happy, especially Bradly when he gets his little package from his pal in the South Bronx. 1945-1963 in the squat ketch your father bought off the bottom of the Charles. In the bay breeze your tow hair caught the sun each time you'd toss the bailing pail; We'd tack from point to buoy across the harbor where we all grew up tugging at boat lines. We are sensitive about sailing there now: the water is alive with the roar of cresting waves and your death sinking the sunset, screaming in oar- locks or hissing in the seagull's breath. I think that you would not like us feeling sensitive about your bay for the sake of your memory and the way you possessed the summer then and hiked out on the heeling edge of life. In the no-season of November they put you in an iron lung. A cold eclipsed your life. Every detail I remember: the phone call, the Navy hymn the choir sang on a scratchy record in the church loft -- Navy sentiment is soft, and now I think the howls we all hurled at the mind and waves of Buzzards Bay in the howling life of August are more like the energy your life craves. A paragraph of Proust -- Three short ones of Stevens. The index of first lines in Robert Frost Complete Poems. A conversation in an early Waugh. Last paragraph: Urn Burial. A short stretch of Beckett. A rapid romp through three cummings. About fifty lines of "The Vanity of Human Wishes." The final frenzy of "Epipsychideon." A letter of Swift to Pope or Pope to Swift. A Whitman list. Three consecutive days in Boswell's Journal. Some mid-chapter paragraphs in The Structure of Complex Words "The Garden." "The Fall of Rome." Your latest poem. Ready....begin. When coming home from work I saw them fly; The bats I mean - they like the dusk. But I Not out because of sunset spend no sigh For things I could not wholly see. I thought The evening's well as spent as bought, and as for bats, I thought my working lot No compromise with sunlight or their dark, although their whipping by on leather wings Suggests antagonistic things. I had no fear of being taught By weak-eyed bats on a twilight's lark. Perhaps the sight of what I see is not the same for bats as is for me; And wanting something that they could not see For what it is and might mistake for kind, I thought a rock could do some honest work And test bats' eyes as well as mine. I proved the better aim. Before night fell I had hit enough bats to tell That radar Could not take me far Or get me home. After a day's work that's All right to play possum with the bats. a perfect day for a poem. But then I had to wash my clothes, buy some food, return overdue books, call my mother, have the oil changed and straighten out the mess things have gotten into lately... In the laundry I had to chase a junkie who was prying open the change box, at the Star Market I ran into an old fraternity brother who invited me to a party, I couldn't stay away from the new magazines at the library, my mother says she's sick again and somehow it's my fault; I never got to the service station; under the pile of old books and newspapers I found ten student papers I haven't graded. And now I just looked outside at the sun setting behind William James Hall. What do you make of that? these are the six possible sides of the dice I rattle toss and read from sunset until sleep when something else begins to live me in the dark. Only in chance and gambling can I be alone enough to feet anonymous; when will and reason retreat like twin toads into the damp, velvet foliage of desire -- giggling like chaste schoolgirls in the attic fondling each other among bundled yellow love letters. When twilight breathes across the tired sky, I let it ruffle off my wrinkled clothes and fumble through my naked, fleshy crevices for the hoarded sensations of my future. The unknown combinations of my lust strike beckoning poses in the vestibule. What masque will wear me out tonight? What replication of myself will lie resting in my arms drained of variety? This evening's questions whet my pulse which knows, thank God, there are no answers. the connection is fuzzy though in spite of all the bickering about reversed charges the way spring usually manages it... even so, there are misunderstandings -- a dip below freezing in late April -- some snowflakes on May Day. The yellow blossoms nipped brown with frost see as daunted as the students hitch-hiking between hot houses. Like the daffodils and forsythia, they aren't New England natives and expose their bare blossoms too early in tie-dyed cotton tees and faded shorts. In the academic litany of suburbs (Praise for the cradle of liberty) college kids get little rest: the city is hung up on history; it spends its juices on restoration. Most places are reminders -- the Charles meanders like a doomed and sullen king. Not even the weather is a native -- it only passes through. The virgin forest has long since been deflowered. The Indians have all gone west to New York, to Politics, to Hollywood. What can flourish here? Only ideas. City of students and chronic illnesses! Boston now allows spring to matriculate in the alleys between hospitals and colleges. Yellow blossoms stain renewed plots like hearts and kidneys transplanted to a public-spirited dowager down in the dumps. By tradition, nothing completely dies in Boston. |