Super 8

Twenty four years ago
my best friend and I
were standing outside our school,
waiting to get our class schedules
but really looking for girls,
one that I had liked had looked
at me and said "Francis,
your father is here", and I
turned, looking behind me,
and a priest was behind me,
his black robes absurd in the summer heat
and I laughed.

I have to remember to tell my son this someday:
when you're sixteen years old
life moves like a Super 8 movie,
it jumps and skips
and you look away and look back
and you're someplace you never expected
to be,

Five months after this day it was
cold again and I had left my best friend's house,
my clothes packed in suitcases in his garage,
it was dark and he was going to bed,
I snuck out a side door and walked out
up the neighborhood,
a few blocks away was the junior high he'd gone to,
I walked around it to the baseball field,
the dugout was a bench, aboveground,
protected by a chainlink fence,
I laid down on the bench,
the fog rolling in, diffusing the light,
I held onto myself tightly
and waited for the night to get colder, colder.