The TurnAuthor(s): Chris GilbertSource: Callaloo, Vol. 24, No. 3, The Best of Callaloo: Poetry. A Special 25th Anniversary Issue(Summer, 2001), pp. 740-742Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3300163 .

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from Vol. 14, No. 4 (Autumn 1991)

THE TURN

by Chris Gilbert

Back home, the cornbread and collards cook upstairs, smelling of years ago, purifying the black basement air

up our noses in a high. You pack the pool balls together into the rack, cracking them like they were bones and your whack would free a dream holed up inside. I break the balls, then inhale- the pattern in the air so poised, it shows the shape from our young selves to this new now that we've become that

peers back here at what we were. Coltrane on the stereo snorts the dream of his last album into notes-Offering, Expression. We share my Schlitz and talk how everybody from the old neighborhood is stricken with the wages from

working in this reservation where every brother is afflicted in the man's mental jail because we end up buying his shit: the Jheri curl, the crossover

step that the ten percent do, the failures to make community, the sad marriages, the visionless work, the nothing to look forward to

living that we all stand in line to do.

Callaloo 24.3 (2001) 740-742

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CALLALOO

But here the room is tranced now, the sweetsmell of leftovers heating upstairs. Across the table from me my same brown muscles etched newer on my brother's arms, the same sweatshirt heartbeat rolling back the sleeves. Now the balls spread out in stars'

patterns, a moving sublime. The black ball is like a coal I wish I could squeeze down

beyond a coal to make a crystal, be the shell that would hold my reflection there, then be the seeing from the reflection that looks with curiosity back at me. We listen-the purging amidst the chaos in Coltrane is being a steadfast improvisation to

silencing this reservation time. Birth, death, the ephemeral: Breath breathed into a story that tells us we are lives just for its vanishing season. Now you break the stillness of four balls bunched near the far pocket, a geometry selflessly unfolding. Then like someone going away, or a wise child on his birthday seeing himself as candle lit and blown out and lit

again each year, you pass the cue to me and motion it's my go; the roll of your shot still gliding.

In this moment we imagine we are the motion of these spheres. Their perfect whirl is living. For a moment I go backwards, wishing I could see my original growing up again. For a moment I expect to find the spirit here that was there in illo tempore. For a moment I expect to resurrect the passing through whose proof was a period used up in time. For a moment while the nothing comes I am nothing

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CALLALOO

till I purge the past from this taking place that is me-the present depository: the sound of Coltrane scaling the upper range of a wall in the dark.

My body is this room crowded with the image of this room. Above the table the light bulb

swings in vanishing arcs where you've brushed it

waving the tip of the cue. Now the egg-shaped shadows beneath the balls swing in response, picking up the oblong signals from this low-watt light. We watch like we don't care, Coltrane's thinking is the sound of a big wheel

spun around so perfectly it is a moon orbiting itself. In shifting light we ebb and surge and surge and break in grin when the black ball misses the hole.

Hearing that upstairs dinner is done moves us to a different mode. And we laugh at this game.

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