a timely, lucky life

I Would Like to Go Back as I Am, Now, to You as You Were, Then--

then when you bagged grit at the sandblasting factory,
loading train cars that took as much as they could stand
and got the hell out of lower Alabama, as you dreamed of doing,
watching them rumble North with your haiku on their dusty sides
written with your spit-wet finger, before changing from your coveralls
for your night school Literature class, your shame, your hope--

Or back, further, to when your mechanic father gave you
a fixed-up car--what you had asked for all through high school,
except it was the first Japanese car the county had seen, a Toyota,
and when you drove by, the boys called it "the rice burner,"
and the girls--pretty, pious, black-and-white as Dalmatians--
wouldn't get inside of it, so you paid five dollars in your empty car
to watch Planet of the Apes at the drive-in alone--

Or back even further to you in your plaid pajamas
sitting up half the humid night because asthma sat on your chest
and crushed no matter how you cried Uncle, so you drew
comic books bulging with muscled heroes until the blue rumble
of logging trucks signaled dawn, and better breathing,
and you could sleep, your chest heaving with its tiny
boy nipples, your legs sticking out with their leg bones--

I have loved you for your shame and your busted body
which aches for three days after we help friends move,
because for years you were valued, like a donkey,
for how much you could carry on your back. I have loved you
for your freakishness, your exile in that homeland
where you hid your paperbacks, spoke the local language,
rose early and carried a gun if you wanted to walk in the woods.

I would like to go back as I am, now, but not as I was then--
unsure what I was prepped for in my Chicago prep school,
where girls skipped Chem to watch boys play soccer, boys
who pulled in our driveways with Benzes then beeped to have us hurry,
I wanted to be one of the thin girls dazzling in their meanness
but learned my tongue's too slow to suck that venom, I needed
to fail before meeting you, before learning myself the lucky one--

I would go back as I am now, bend over your ribs,
lift the damp V of your pajamas and blow on your neck,
blow a breeze smelling like snow, sounding like somebody
whistling far away--I would go back to ride in your Toyota,
beat time to your eight track of Styx with my feet on the dash,
we'd cruise the drive-in and park, back row center,
let the girls gawk at the windows gauzy with heat--

I would go back to find you at the simmering factory
and free your wet curls from the clench of your hard hat
and unlace your boots almost lunar with red mud
and unzip your coveralls, a zipper long as lower Alabama--
go back as I am, now, and reach in, and kneel down,
and lick you to life, the life we couldn't know we were heading for,
a timely, lucky life, just beyond the margins of this poem.
[Beth Ann Fennelly, 'I Would Like to Go Back as I Am, Now, to You as You Were, Then' in Open House]