One of the Pirates got arrested for tripping
a woman in a hot-dog suit as she raced down
the first base line in a contest with a man in
a sausage suit & a man in a kielbasa suit
during some kind of seventh-inning stretch
sideshow & it made me think of everyone
I had ever known from Pittsburgh because
it seemed exactly like the kind of thing that
any of them would’ve done. I never thought
any of them were bad people but I always
knew they were up to something with their
pointed faces & their wait-while-I-think
smiles & their walk thrust so far forward
it looks like falling. Take Jack who taught me
you can live anywhere as long as you make
yourself useful & do those things the people
letting you live there don’t want to have to
do. A lesson he must have taught his cousin
Malakoff a guy I let live with me one summer
& who fed me every night half with the food
he found in people’s cupboards & half with
what he found in the trash & who used my
spare room to build bicycles out of parts of
other bicycles he “found” on the street until
he moved to D.C. just for the protests & learned
to crawl his way out of riots under the bodies
of unconscious women. I even thought of
Dave Bouchat who wasn’t from Pittsburgh
though his family was & who wanted to be
a race-car driver & used to take me in his car
& leap us over hills & land on one tire & never
killed anyone until he joined the army. They
all seem like they have a knife somewhere or
have an idea of where to get a knife somewhere
& while they aren’t from Hartford I think
I understand them & their strange lives run
by drugs & engines & the urge to walk faster
than their legs which must come from Pittsburgh
because I’ve been there & when I saw the hills
people were falling down them all the time.