Prodigy
By Charles Simic
I grew up bent over a chessboard. I loved the word endgame. All my cousins looked worried. It was a small house near a Roman graveyard. Planes and tanks shook its windowpanes. A retired professor of astronomy taught me how to play. That must have been in 1944. In the set we were using, the paint had almost chipped off the black pieces. The white King was missing and had to be substituted for. I'm told but do not believe that that summer I witnessed men hung from telephone poles. I remember my mother blindfolding me a lot. She had a way of tucking my head suddenly under her overcoat. In chess, too, the professor told me, the masters play blindfolded, the great ones on several boards at the same time.
"Prodigy"