Chess Lives | John Grey
Chess Lives | John Grey Ten painted boards on ten stone tables are scattered throughout the park, These are little battlegrounds where men and women hunker down on hard marble benches, heads on elbows, plotting, ceaselessly plotting, bodies still as winter ponds, all thinking confined to within the boundaries of the playing field. From game to game, it’s the same sixty-four red and black squares, arcane wooden sculptures huddled at each end, or taking pot-shots at each other in the busy center, or, at the hush of battle's end, falling in with war-hardened survivors to batter a deposed sovereign. Now and then, a thought is rerouted to the fingers and a piece is moved. It could be a pawn thrust out into no-man’s land. Or a cagey knight pouncing sideways. Or the bishop, long and lean, policing the diagonals. Or the rook, squat and turreted, bludgeoning its way forward once its own men make way. Or the queen, serene and all-powerful, the oldest living feminist. Or the kin...
