Stephen Lackaye

The Poet at Seventeen

after Levis

My youth? I see it mostly in the sure decline
of quarters in the dull and bright arcades where
I spent it all, religiously, committing habits
and patterns to reflex to extend my future games. 

Outside, the asphalt’s rain steamed off while
floodlights shied or seemed to make their peace
with the cover of cars holding couples up
who leaned on each other, wondering how to leave. 

The next day they’d plot the paucity of hours
spent in the same theaters, cinematic aspirations
orphaned on their tongues. Even then they worried
how to occupy the years that spread before them. 

When the poet says there were fields he disced,
I don’t know what it means, even though I know
I lived some equivalent boredom, and these days
you have to make a choice to remain this ignorant: 

anyone can find video of tractors’ indolent turning,
pesticides enacting their controls in lapsed time,
or a seventeen year-old in a field in throes
in Sausalito or Mejugorje. It didn’t matter 

then, in Poughkeepsie, in New York, in 1996,
when the poet I never met and loved anyway
but did not love yet died. By the standards of the place,
I was dying too, though he had a 30-year headstart 

the night I drove a car into the pedestrian-saving
pylons of the mall, then walked to the motel where
I hoped the police wouldn’t find me at least until
I’d slept it off. Of course, I could see it coming. 

There were people in that town who knew already
they’d never leave and who pitied me the absence
of a god. I practiced a turn of the wrist against
the assurance of death. And I don’t even know 

what a kind of triumph would have looked like:
to play the game to its end or prolong the playing.
The hours churned and I went unseen. Stars fell
in broken elements. It rained or didn’t rain. 

A life like that? It seemed inexorable—
Running quarters down to nothing, then credit
at the bar. The vacant 3-lanes through downtown.
Light pollution. Asphalt. But mostly now I remember 

the roar of gates in the mall at close, a fatal
post-teen pulling the plugs on machines around me.
And then the night air like the breath of two people
filling space enough for one. The inveterate lots. 

And then the neighborhoods I coasted, windows
like dead amusements. And games I never played.
And how determined houses clutched their lawns
although the nights were short and nothing was in doubt.

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Stephen Lackaye’s first collection of poems, Self-Portrait in Dystopian Landscape, won the Unicorn Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award and Eric Hoffer Prize. Recent poems have appeared in Southern Review, Southern Indiana Review and Los Angeles Review, among others. He lives with his family in Oregon, where he is a bookseller.