Comeback.

• Author: Connolly, James F.
• Position: Poem

Comeback Rocco Francis Marchegiano: I met him once. He shook my hand, said "Nice to meet you, kid," and looked away, money on his mind. I was with his nephew. I said "Nice to meet you, champ," and looked away. I was sixteen, my own hits and licks on my mind. Our city's legend retired into a dull weight of fame-- overrated, underrated-- and death in 1969, Newton, Iowa, a mangled plane. His body flown home to Brockton, to our family's funeral home, my grandfather buried him-- my father, the embalmer, touched him up. In 1970, I went to Des Moines, Iowa to teach and met Lowell Coburn, the young undertaker who shipped Rocky's corpse back home to Brockton. He lived next door. "Nice to meet you," he said. "Coincidence is what death can give us." And when I returned to Brockton, a beaten-up place with window grates on Main Street's abandoned stores, the steel defending against the nothing that is left, I couldn't find the signs of my old hometown. At George's Cafe, one of the city's last landmarks, I walked through its rooms to study all the newspaper clippings and photos hanging on the restaurant's walls. I stalked each fight in search of the city that was gone: Below Rocky's photos, Ali snaps a left through the bloody mouth of Cooper, and Hagler's right cross clubs the "Motor City Cobra's" chin, a right, that night, as right as right, the "Hit Man's" legs collapsing, his eyes on queer street, that bewildered look that takes me back to the rings and heavy bags of my youth, all the bad words, the punches given and taken. They come back to me like letters through a...