Poetry
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Sweetwater
He drove a Checker cab in Chicago
that I hailed in a hail-and-rain frenzy
to make an eastbound flight, or westbound, late
a Thursday afternoon
thirty years ago.
Only a Checker could have fit that man.
He got me to Midway Airport in sleet in time
for my flight to Albany, or Des Moines,
but at thirty-thousand feet I wished he had been late
so that I could have hired him to drive me
all over Chicago, along the lake shore,
even under the El and round the Loop all night
just to listen to him more.
Not for nothing was he called Sweetwater.
I knew him from the Globetrotters uniform
on the young man in the faded Polaroid snapshot
Scotch-taped to the cracked, split dashboard.
Nat Clifton broke the color barrier
in American professional basketball,
the NBA, that is—the Harlem Globetrotters
didn’t count, but he had no photograph of him
in his New York Knickerbockers uniform.
32 MARIN ARTS & CULTURE
He was all soft exuberance in stories of Chicago,
its players, and basketball players he knew—
Goose Tatum, Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell.
It was only in the air I remembered
I remembered none of them.
Bud Palmer, Sweetwater’s Hollywood-born
white teammate, inventor of the jump shot some said,
his roommate when the Knicks were on the road,
in St. Louis say, now he’s died too. Palmer
I gather, played a sort of Pee Wee Reese
to Sweetwater’s Jackie Robinson.
The forty last blocks of the ride to Midway
teem. The storm has passed, street-gutter inlets
clog or the Lake has risen too high
but the South Side can’t drain, and sits
squatted in water to its sidewalks.
Young men past sullen, women long past
emerge from rows of apartment houses
slow, lean on peeled walls, stand beneath street lamps
near the curb, no PeeWee or a Bud near,
only standing, still, bitter water.