Little bender of the lights and leaves,

little bucket champion swinging out

and out, little unskilled animal so kind

and cumbersome beneath us,

how could you leave me

stuck behind buses in the slow construction zones,

among the closed diners and ditches

of myself? You were made of tough apples

like my hands. You and I came back

and back with the smells of hills

and our town’s winds. Old man,

your blue gums gnawed so softly

the salt of Indiana roads, how can

those roads lead anywhere now not touching

you? Who soothes the lawn

now that your husky song and breath

are gone? I’m sorry: all of our circles

and circles, our pitch and catch of park

and back and park and never once

did we arrive at seas. But you

weren’t meant for seas. If you

with your sweet crouch encountered one

you could only fall

onto your back like a dead fish and grow

so small in that crush of sound

who would remember you?

Who do you remember, sad huncher?

My dad called your clutch “forgiving”

and you forgave: weeks and weeks

of unclean fluids, months of wearing our handprints

and the silt of where we left you,

nights out in the crushing cold you always

started after. You endured

our cruel names: “Puff the Tragic Wagon,”

“Lank Ass.” You endured my going after

the same roads, the same girls, you cut the same

bland path through gravel and glass to bring me

to six or seven stupid jobs, endured

my friends’ smoking and jazz right in your belly

till you wore our mammal smells forever.

Each morning you bore me tingling

and I’d leave you, full of your sounds,

so that standing in the sad valleys of high school

they revved through my blood,

so that even now some nights your voice is there

and my blood goes missing.

I’ve made a place for you

little bluegill of the wind

where your radio is off to let in your whir,

where you glide through the wet, pulling

long clouds of color off the trees,

where all over it is October

and our bodies feel supple, lifting toward the sky’s orange vat.

Jeffrey Bean (AL)  is an MFA candidate at The University of Alabama and an assistant poetry editor for The Black Warrior Review. His poems have appeared in Quarterly West, New Orleans Review, The Midwest Quarterly, and elsewhere. He is a recipient of a 2005 AWP Intro Journals Project award.