for Noah
Beauty is not a luxury, rather it is a way of creating possibility…
—Saidiya Harman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
It’s evening, and the grass is gathering
cold. We are the last two on the track,
silhouetted underneath the football field
uprights, not ready for the heat to leave us.
The high jump mat is webbed in shadows
growing deeper every moment—soon
the light will be too thin for trying; soon
we’ll stow the bar and standards, replace
the cover on the mat, unlace our spikes,
and slip into our nighttime trivialities,
disappear into the dulling of an institution
that will mistake us for each other,
but for now we set the bar above the heights
we understand, allow ourselves each one last
attempt. The germinating dark is silent
but for crickets; we are each other’s only
witnesses. We understand like no one else does
how it feels to be a body hanging, burning
in the space between. Interchangeable,
disposable. We know that when they see us
they see both, or neither. At meets, they call us
the high jump brothers, ask us if we’re maybe twins
or cousins. Tonight, I jump first. A few
false starts, and then I’m off, elastic-smooth,
determined, wondering what it’d be like
to clear this height with no one here to know
but us. To claim it: yes, I’ve cleared six eight.
But I miss—unmoor it with my shoulder,
though as we set it up again Noah assures me
I was over it. Just a matter of alignment, of
fine-tuning. Now he takes his mark.
Pauses for a moment, then starts bounding,
slowly curving, making tighter, smaller steps,
keeping something headlong, something
starter pistol in his stride, then up.
A sail full with sudden wind. An exhale
of an upward motion. Turning as he rises, blooms.
His head clears, then his torso, then his calves. He
clips it with his heels, his kick a millisecond slow,
but it’s clear this height belongs
to him. Given time, given another run, another jump
like that. His. His body and the bar start falling, then
they stop midair. Something in the fabric of the
evening splits open. Time implodes,
and at its center, Noah, in the air above the mat,
going supernova; full of everything he ever wanted,
everything he didn’t: protostars and space clouds,
black holes and pulsar winds. Laws of man
undone, rewritten around cotton candy swirls
of gravity and color. Black boy as anything, as
the music of an inner world inside out. I see
galaxies erupting, life reforming.
Planets where the word for dark means sacred.
Worlds where we move like we move
in the air, unbound. Then he lands, and things
compose themselves again. Stars unborn.
Shockwaves in reverse, until the world
is how it was, though we felt it change.
We saw it rearrange itself.
We saw the world rearrange itself for us.
—Gustav Parker Hibbett (The Adroit Journal)