The Right Cross

JUNE 1988

PHILIP LEVINE

THE RIGHT CROSS

The sun rising over the mountains

found me awake, found an entire valley

of sleepers awake, dreaming of a few hours

more of sleep. Though the Great Central Valley

is home for the homeless, the fruit pickers

of creation, for runaway housewives

bored by their husbands, and bored husbands,

the rising sun does not dip back behind

the Sierras until we're ready. The Valley sun

just comes on. We rise, drop our faces

in cold water, and face the prospects

of a day like the last one from which we

have not recovered. All this month I've

gone in search of the right cross, the punch

which had I mastered it forty years ago

might have saved me from the worst. The heavy bag

still hangs from the rafters of the garage,

turning in no wind, where my youngest son

left it when he went off ten years ago

abandoning his childish pursuits to me.

After tea, dry toast, and some toe-touching,

I'm ready to work. I pull on the salty

bag gloves, bow my head, dip one shoulder

into the great sullen weight, and begin

with a series of quick jabs. I'm up

on my toes, moving clockwise, grunting

as the blows crumple, the air going out

and coming back in little hot benedictions.

I'm remembering Nate Coleman barking

all those years ago, "Straight from the shoulder,

Levine," as though describing his own nature.

The gentlest man I ever knew, perfect

with his fists, our master and mentor,

who fought only for the love of it,

living secretly by day in suit and tie,

vending copper cookware from the back seat

of his black Plymouth. The dust rises

from the sour bag, and I feel how fragile

my left wrist has become, how meek the bones

of my shoulders as the shocks come home,

the bag barely moving. "Let it go!"

Nate would call, urging the right hand out

against the big light heavies, Marvin

with his sudden feints and blunt Becker,

his face grim and closed behind cocked fists.

Later, the gym gone silent in the half-dark,

Nate would stand beside me, left hand

on my shoulder, and take my right wrist

loosely in his right hand, and push it out

toward an imagined foe, his right knee

pressed behind my right knee until my leg

came forward. I could feel his words

. - "like this"-falling softly on my cheek

and smell the milky sweetness of his breath

- "you just let it go"-, the dark lashes

of his mysterious green eyes unmoving.

The bag is going now, swinging easily

with the force of jabs and hooks. The garage

moans as though this dance at its center

threatened to bring it down. I throw a right,

another, and another before I take my rest

in the cleared space amid the detritus

of five lives: boxes of unanswered letters,

school papers, report cards, scattered parts

of lawn mowers and motorcycles gone to ground.

The sky is coming through the mismatched boards

of the roof, pure blue and distant, the day

rising from the oily cement of the floor

as again I circle the heavy bag throwing out

more punches until I can't. If my sons

were here they'd cheer me on, and l'd

keep going into the impossible heat

and before I quit I might throw, just once,

for the first time, the perfect right cross.

They say it's magic. When it lands

you feel the force of your whole body,

even the deeper organs, the dark fluids

that go untapped for decades, the tiny

pale microbes haunting the bone marrow,

the intricate patterns that devised

the bones of the feet, you feel them

finally coming together like so many

atoms of salt and water as they form

an ocean or a tear, for just an instant

before the hand comes back under the chin

in its ordinary defensive posture.

There are boys and grown men who dream

of the squared circle into which the light

falls evenly as they move without effort

hour after hour, breathing easily, oiled

with their own sweat, fighting for nothing

except the beauty of their own balance,

the precision of each punch. I never did.

I hated to fight. I saw each blow

in a sequence of events leading

finally to a winner and a loser, and I

was the loser, crushed in body and spirit.

Yet I fought as boys were told to do,

and won and lost as men must. That's over.

Six months from my sixtieth year, doused

in my own juices, I call it quits

for the day, having earned the rituals-

the long bath, the shave, the laundered clothes,

the afternoon muse as the little clots

of stiffness break up and travel down

the channels of the blood. After dinner

and before sleep, I walk behind the garage

among grape vines and swelling tomatoes

to where the morning glories close down

in the rising darkness and the cosmos

flare their brilliant whites a last time

before the moon comes out. From under

the orange trees the click and chuckle

of quail; the tiny chicks dart out

for a last look and scurry back again

before the earth goes gray. A dove moans,

another answers from a distant yard as though

they called each other home, called each of us

back to our beds for the day's last work.