Today’s prompt is a poem:
The Esquire, by Philip Levine
The Esquire was part bowling alley, part
nightclub, so when the musicians played
we sat at our tables wondering how
they could go on over the crashing pins,
the men shouting and cursing, the women’s
laughter high and false. Bernie, Tassone,
Williams, and I nursed our drinks, saying
as little as possible while the bass player,
a young Italian kid, Tassone’s cousin,
raised his dark sweat-streaked face heavenward
and hummed as he bowed, his eyes closed up
as though he’d entered another life.
“The Man I Love,” the balding drummer
whispered into the mike, and a woman,
brown-skinned, no less than forty, appeared
from nowhere and began to sing in a voice
roughened by smoke, a voice barely there.
“She could be my sister,” Bernie said.
Blond, pale, Slavic, the favorite son,
he told us, of a Polish nobleman, though his mother
worked nights at Ford Rouge. The singer
held out her long, bare, muscular arms
as though offering the word
more than it ever gave, and she too turned
her face upward, eyes closed, to address
someone not there. In seven hours it would be
Monday morning, a yellow sun would rise
over the great snowy wastes of the parking lots.
I turned and Bernie was crying without sound,
the tears streaming down his long, angular face
shamelessly. “I want to be held,” he said,
“just once I want to be held as a man.”
And you ask what happened later, did
Bernie wait until the place closed down
to offer the singer a ride home, did I
loan him my car, a black four-door Kaiser
on its last legs, did Tassone’s cousin,
severe in his long black overcoat, die
that night from a heroin overdose or was it
another night behind another club,
did Williams go off to Korea
in Truman’s army as he said he would,
did I refuse and wind up in my own hell?
None of that matters now. The sun rose on time
over the great parking lots, empty now
that we’re all too old or too dead to work.
