Work of the Day - January 1, 2007 - Adult Night at Skate World by Christina Kallery

Let's see how much better I can do at actually making this a Work of the Day program and not one I do every fourth day (If I have to listen to Ed Champion call me a slacker again all year, I'm not sure what I'll do!).  Here we go, 1 for 1!

Beating the odds (and I must proclaim these to have been subconsciously affected odds, and not intentional), I'm starting off the year with a female author.  The original intention of Work of the Day was to look at pieces from literary journals, online sources, and collections that I don't believe I'll be getting around to doing full reviews of anytime soon.  And also, keeping in mind the spirit of the EWN, to look for work by lesser known authors, smaller presses, and the like.

With that in mind, and some fairly regular mentions of this author's name, without offering any examples of her work, I've done a bit of digging and found a poem by Christina Kallery that is available online, as Detroit's The Metro Times reprinted it this past May (it was originally published in the Winter 2005 issue of Rattle) and has it in the online archives - Adult Night at Skate World:

Adult Night at Skate World

You'd think it was an eighth grade dance,
the way we stand shyly eying each other
when the first slow notes sound for couples' skate.

A fifty-ish man in a striped headband
and custom skates fit with blinking lights
asks would I mind? So we roll from the worn

carpet onto the glossy floor. One hand on my waist,
he gazes at a far wall and sings in high, quivering
tones to Endless Love. We pass a dozen

other couples: office managers in sport shirts,
single mothers squeezed into new jeans
and a few lone ones gliding through the tide of clasped hands.

Take the handsome Indian man with dark hair swept
like a raven's wings from its stern middle part,
the moustache trimmed to a neat em-dash.

He moves like a figure skater, one long leg aloft
behind his jump-suited frame. No woman here tonight
can match his prowess as he weaves easy figure eights,

turns and sails backwards without a glance;
though I imagine his likely office job, manning
some cubicle in a gray and taupe-y sea

and the gaping dark that crouches nightly at his door.
Now the rink's Robert Plant commands the floor
beneath a silver disco orb and twirls once, twice,

a third time, pretending not to watch us
watching him. In his prime in '85, that bleached
mass of frizzed-out curls would have bobbed radiant

under hot stage lights during the guitar solo,
his attention rapt to the art at hand, yet aware
as a preening animal of the lip-glossed girls

in the front row whose eyes simmered
with envy and desire. But the gigs
have fizzled into soundlessness,

the Dodge van scrapped, the red guitar lies
long untuned in its velvet chamber
and each Sunday at 8 he pulls the black skates

from their nook and somehow finds a rhythm
not unlike rock and roll in this dim-lit dome
with its carnival colors and claw machine and women

fluffing their hair in restroom mirrors.
Just overhead hover the sour divorces,
languished careers, botched plans, those hours when life

took a sharp turn toward the inscrutable
and left us older and daunted in its wake.
But when the DJ calls the night's last song, we —

the lonesome and afraid, the jaded
and lost — peer through strobe lights
for somebody, if not lovable, then not a lunatic

and sing to a tune we first heard the summer
someone else left and we wept against a cool steering wheel
and felt the world spin, fierce and marvelous beneath our feet.

What I enjoy about Kallery's writing is her ability, which I think most great writers have, to take a specific, and bring it around, without forcing it, to a general.  That is, observing something as detailed as the adult nights that some roller skating rinks have, and being able to bring it around to the much more common emotion the bulk of the readers will have encountered, that of having been left behind from a romance.  Looking closely, she is able to do this very smoothly - there's no big jump alerting the reader with bells and whistles and neon signs - it just happens.

Kallery also has a nice manner of dropping in details that help complete the feeling she wants to convey to the reader - the "worn carpet," the "quivering tones," and "single mothers squeezed into new jeans" all place the reader right there on the sidelines with their own pair of black skates on.  And if I've read a better evocation of the search at last call then "for somebody, if not lovable, then not a lunatic," I certainly cannot recall it.

Come back tomorrow for a look at a short story by Jim Tomlinson.

Comments

[Katrina Denza]

I'd love to know how you do it, Dan. How you find the time to do so much. I'm looking forward to another year of EWN.

[Dan Wickett]

You just have to cut your television watching to down to 20 hours per week. Have your computer on all day long. And, oh yeah, be willing to cut your sleep down to between 3 and 5 hours per night. Then you're set!

[Katrina Denza]

Ha! I've got the television part down, and even the computer part, but I get very grumpy without my sleep. ;)

[Robert]

This is one of my favorite poems by Christina Kallery. As I've told Christina, the poems I like best are those which, during and after reading, you're not sure whether you want to laugh or cry or both. She nailed it with this one, and others of hers. Beyond theme and content--this poem is also a great showcase of Christina's ability to render concrete imagery, precise language, a sonic texture, all within a poem that reads like a short film, i.e. that is both mysterious and unpredictable but leaves you feeling satisfied. It's a beauty.