Joshua Rathkamp
The Night the Tigers Beat the Yankees
All I saw was one member of Earth
Wind and Fire playing backup guitar
with a lead singer just good enough
to keep us there,
paying ten dollars a beer
while the slot machines and craps tables
rolled on without us.
If I wasn’t almost broke,
wasn’t still pissed at my poor job
playing cards, I would have been happy
as the man in a floral shirt
who handed me a Bud Light
and clinked the bottom of our bottles
when he said cheers.
I wanted to cheer, to go back
to Detroit in ‘84
where cars still got built
by American hands with American parts
by men in town
who proudly bought and drove them.
Even on Saturdays garage doors rose,
headlights turned the corner and vanished.
So my dad was the only dad left
steering the van to the game.
We’d pile in the back, drive downtown,
see the buildings that cars made,
the large steel towers before
the broken windows, the houses
before they were shut up by boards.
We’d pass Grand River and Woodward,
streets as forgettable as the reason for their names,
how men rode north
into this great gray state
and sent logs down the rivers, so many
you could walk straight across without falling through. |
