Terry Moore

Our moms got us together at Woolworth’s,
remember? Cheeseburgers. Summertime. 1967:
Twelve years in the world, mostly we burned
for football, to get it and move, to shake anybody
that wanted to bring us down: six points
was all we needed and time to find the future
where we’d be bad-ass superstars. We thought it was
hard being young with adults running things, and it was
getting harder not to think about girls and which words
would bring them close to our hands. Mini-skirts:
remember checkin’ the cheese in study hall—Marna
Evans—we had no idea where those legs could lead.
If it weren’t for movies and the legends
of our big brothers we might never have believed
in smooth whispers, long kisses and maybe, even now,
we’d be dreaming only football—the rough touch
of leather tightly laced, grabbed and carried
to a place where men danced with nothing
to explain—the end zone, the promised land—and who
could blame us for craving such a simple destination?
Then came Joanie and, for me, it was Jane: short hugs,
slow songs, their mouths swimming into our mouths.
Among the Philly brothers, the word was “swag.”
Did you swag on her, we’d ask, supposing the wet
dream of lips. How many times did y’all swag: so new,
the French kiss, the perfect neighborhood for anyone
as crazy and blue-balled as boys blazing on the verge
of the verge of their lives. Man,
we spent years on the phone daring each other
not to be young, not to be afraid of whatever
sex might mean. That paperback you found, Nurse
Nadine—the way she treated her patients: (what
exactly was a blow-job and how long would it be
till we knew?) Our fathers were scary men—younger
than we are now—and ready to make themselves “clear”
without saying anything, especially when we got too cool
to listen, too big to hear. Did they believe in sex
the way we were starting to? Was there some secret living
softly inside their fists? My father loved my mother.
It looked so simple: year after year, the kiss
goodbye after breakfast, the kiss hello about five,
conversation at dinner, TV until time for bed.
It’s pretty clear I didn’t know much
about my parents—just that they were usually
nice people and mostly on my side, and this
makes me wonder just how blind I’m gonna be,
‘cause these days I hardly see anything
the way I saw things back then and, brah,
my eyes are wide open. The NFL will never
see us: I can’t do half the moves we used to do—
loose-leg lean, that cutback stutter: short grass
lit beneath our simmering feet— but I’m glad
these forty years have found us still friends,
that we played some football and watched each other
break slowly into men which is what we are by now,
which was always what we thought we really wanted.

Tim Seibles