to read a fairly long poem from my first book, Grimoire.'
He winked in Patricia McCardle's direction, then took them all into his humorous confidence. 'But God hates a coward, right?'
Ron snorted laughter behind him and then they were all laughing, and for a moment he actually did see a glint of her pearly-whites behind those stretched, furious lips, and oh boy howdy, that was just about as good as you'd want, wasn't it?
Watch out for her, Gard. You think you've got your boot on her neck now, and maybe you even do, for the moment, but watch out for her. She won't forget.
Or forgive.
But that was for later. Now he opened the battered copy of his first book of poems. He didn't need to look for 'Leighton Street'; the book fell open to it of its own accord. His eyes found the subscript. For Bobbi, who first smelled sage in New York.
'Leighton Street' had been written the year he met her, the Year Leighton Street was all she could talk about. It was, of course, the street in Utica where she had grown up, the street she'd needed to escape before she could even start being what she wanted to be - a simple writer of simple stories. She could do that; she could do that with flash and ease. Gard had known that almost at once. Later that year he had sensed that she might be able to do more: to surmount the careless, profligate ease with which she wrote and do, if not great work, brave work. But first she had to get away from Leighton Street. Not the real one, but the Leighton Street which she carried with her in her mind, a demon geography populated by haunted tenements and her sick, loved father, her weak, loved mother, and her defiant crone of a sister, who rode over them all like a demon of endless power.
Once, that year, she had fallen asleep in class - Freshman Comp, that had been. He had been gentle with her, because he already loved her a little and he had seen the huge circles under her eyes.
'I've had problems sleeping at night,' she said, when he held her after class for a moment. She had still been half-asleep, or she never would have gone on from there; that was how powerful Anne's hold - which was the hold of Leighton Street -had been over her. But she was like a person who has been drugged, and exists with one leg thrown over each side of the sleep's dark and stony wall. 'I almost fall asleep and then I hear her.'
'Who?' he asked gently.
'Sissy . . . my sister Anne, that is. She grinds her teeth and it sounds like b-b-b - '
Bones, she wanted to say, but then she woke into a fit of hysterical weeping that had frightened him very badly.
Anne.
More than anything else, Anne was Leighton Street.
Anne had been
(knocking at the door)
the gag of Bobbi's needs and ambitions.
Okay, Gard thought. For you, Bobbi. Only for you. And began to read 'Leighton Street' as smoothly as if he had spent the afternoon rehearsing it in his room.
'These streets begin where the cobbles
surface through tar like the heads
of children buried badly in their textures,'
Gardener read.
'What myth is this? we ask, but
the children who play stickball and
Johnny-Jump-My-Pony round here just laugh.
No myth they tell us no myth, just they say hey motherfucker aint nothing but Leighton Street here, aint nothing but all small houses aint only but back porches where our mothers wash there and they're and their.
Where days grow hot and on Leighton Street they listen to the radio while pterodactyls flow between the TV aerials on the roof and they say hey motherfucker they say Hey motherfucker!
No myth they tell us no myth, just they say hey motherfucker aint nothing but Leighton Street round here
This they say is how you be silent in your silence of days, Motherfucker.
When we turned our back on these upstate roads, warehouses with faces of blank brick, when you say "O, but I have reached the end of all I know and still hear her grinding, grinding in the night . .
Because it had been so long since he had read the poem, even to himself, he did not just 'perform' it (something, he had discovered, that was almost impossible not to do at the end of a tour such as this); he rediscovered it. Most of those who came to the reading at Northeastern