Remembering Muhammad Ali

I was a United States Navy veteran protesting the Vietnam War when I learned Ali had refused induction into the Army. At the time I was a raging boxing fan and followed Ali’s every move, but nothing he did increased my respect for him more than this act of conscience in full public view. For my generation Ali was a force, a kind of archetype that crossed race, language and time. To hear this voice, this rhyming poet, this public conscience at a time of war-mongering and political mendacity was indeed a breath of fresh air. His brashness, talent and raw beauty mattered a lot but so did his carriage, his impish majesty and his spiritual center.

I recall seeing Ali fight Joe Frazier in the “Thrilla in Manila” on a wide screen in an agricultural hall at the Allentown, PA, Fairgrounds. The place was noisy. There was a large contingent of people, mainly men, from the Lehigh Valley region who wanted Frazier to beat Ali to a pulp. The “draft dodger” chant was in the air. Police were out in force, patting people down, checking for booze, weapons and drugs.

The following poem, “With Ali in AG Hall,” published in 1984 in “That Kingdom Coming Business,” is not a blow-by-blow but a poem about how Ali touched the minds, hearts and souls of fans. Old men who remember Sugar Ray Robinson losing to Randy Turpin fill the air with anecdotes. Ali is everywhere: “You came in a wind. You were our third wish, our first hope.”

With Ali in AG Hall

We entered the closed-circuit stall

Cattle hair on the rafters, love juice passed in jugs.

The coffee smoke from barnripe joints

Made the market drunk. We rubbed ours hands,

A can, a butt. You came in a wind

You were our third wish, our first hope.

Gun-running with wine and dreamy song broke

the policeman’s back. He spread his authority

against the wall and stripped his mind

of gun and billy club. He made peace with the beer.

He made peace with the canvas back of screen

that ripped at every thunder beat of a stagecrew hand.

Men and women pulled a decade of dreams and

squalor

across the barnyard floor with their hoot-owl noise.

The body count, the typist with the golden legs, the man

who rode eternal horse, all roamed the thumb-bone

of the mind. The lobe in the midweek aisle moaned.

We waited the circle fist to coat us in suburban love,

to raise the trickle pitch of terror lost

in the safety of our days.

Who can tell the joy you dragged in on your shawl.

The old man who knew the hour that the Turpin head

fell to the Sugar arm of fate. The woman who knew

every card in the fighting deck. And the younger.

We leaned out to delicious habit

to the oily crankcase wisdom of the old.

You were our calendar of puberty, the man outside

of class

when Odysseus found the Cyclop eye

and Hector beat on his chest.

Your wand of a right chilled the stutter-step

of the butcher stroke which painted your inside.

And we were glad. Your journey to the well,

your ragtime stint in Gethsemane,

your toll, made the hall wail

like a Time Square drunk

who shifts the weight of his heart

from foot to foot.