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Sport 30: Peter Black-Real Fiction

James Brown — You Live Here

page 39

James Brown

You Live Here

Everything looked to have just picked itself up
or else be on the brink of collapse.
I'd never seen him before in my life,
but I knew him immediately—his history and counter history,
his deciduous future; that he would die behind
a broken seatbelt on a flat June morning in 2004
still protesting his innocence.
‘You live here?’ I said.
‘Nope,’ he replied, releasing the German shepherds, ‘you live here.’
I'd never been there before in my life.
Everywhere has to be somewhere,
but sometimes some somewheres have an everywhereness
about them that is remarkably close to home,
was how I mangled it as the shepherds came on.
I dunno, perhaps it was the quality of the light …?

Black and white photograph.

From ‘Sites’, 1988–90