Football

Louis Jenkins

Here's a moment of sports confusion for you.


I take the snap from the center, fake to the right, fade back...
I've got protection. I've got a receiver open downfield...
What the hell is this? This isn't a football, it's a shoe, a man's
brown leather oxford. A cousin to a football maybe, the same
skin, but not the same, a thing made for the earth, not the air.
I realize that this is a world where anything is possible and I
understand, also, that one often has to make do with what one
has. I have eaten pancakes, for instance, with that clear corn
syrup on them because there was no maple syrup and they
weren't very good. Well, anyway, this is different. (My man
downfield is waving his arms.) One has certain responsibilities,
one has to make choices. This isn't right and I'm not going
to throw it.

from Nice Fish: New and Selected Prose Poems, 1995
Holy Cow! Press, Duluth, Minn.

Mystery Baseball

Philip Dacey


No one knows the man who throws out the season's
first ball.
His face has never appeared in the newspapers,
except in crowd scenes, blurred.
Asked his name, he mumbles something
about loneliness,
about the beginning of hard times.

Each team fields an extra, tenth man.
This is the invisible player,
assigned to no particular position.
Runners edging off base feel a tap on their shoulders,
turn, see no one.
Or a batter, the count against him, will hear whispered
in his ear vague, dark
rumors of his wife, and go down.

Vendors move through the stands
selling unmarked sacks,
never disclosing their contents,
never having been told.
People buy, hoping.

Pitchers stay busy
getting signs.
They are everywhere.

One man rounds third base, pumping hard,
and is never seen again.
Teammates and relatives wait years at the plate,
uneasy, fearful.

An outfielder goes for a ball on the warning track.
He leaps into the air and keeps rising,
beyond himself, past
the limp flag.
Days later he is discovered,
descended, wandering dazed in centerfield.

Deep under second base lives an old man,
bearded, said to be
a hundred. All through the game,
players pull at the bills of their caps,
acknowledging him.

Ping-Pong Alfresco

Cameron Blake


I grab my paddle
and slam out the door.
My brother and I take our sides
and prepare for the match.
To see who serves,
I spin the paddle—
the paddle with electrical tape
wrapped around the handle,
the paddle covered
with scrapes and tears
from various "incidents."

I serve the ball
over the wooden net
and onto the grooved table
fashioned from
two sawhorses
and two old doors
we found behind the house,
which creates crazy ricochets
as we play.

I wait for a real
Ping-Pong table,
one with a reliable surface
and soft net,
one with official lines
and even sides,
one that's actually green.
But until then

this one's perfect.

Speed

David MacDonald


0 MPH
I mount my bike.
Both feet hit the pedals at once
as I launch myself forward
and shoot down the steep hill.
5 MPH

Lean forward.
Pedal harder.
15 MPH
Wind hits my face,
and my eyes blur.

25 MPH

Then 30.

I hit the first jump.
My wheels leave the ground behind
as I fly through the air

for two seconds

before I'm jolted
by a rough landing
back to Earth.
The excitement ends
when I stand on the brakes
and skid to a stop.

0 MPH

Six Minutes Twenty-Six Seconds

James Morrill


Throat scorched.
Chest burning.
Fast jogging.
Keep up, keep up-
two hundred
meters behind.

Breath fast.
Breath shallow.
I'm short distance.
Thought
I was on a roll:
beat my time
in hurdles,
beat my height
in high jump.

Last lap.
Breath fire.
Finish hard.
Last to cross
but get my time.

Win.

To An Athlete Dying Young

A. E. Housman


THE time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.

To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay,
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears:

Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.

So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.

And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl's.

Elegy for a Diver

Peter Meinke


Jacknife swandive gainer twist
High off the board you’d pierce the sky
And split the apple of the devil sun
And spit in the sun’s fierce eye.
When you were young you never missed,
Archer-diver who flew too high
So everything later became undone.

Later everything burned to ash
Wings too close to the sun broke down
Jacknife swandive gainer twist
Can’t be done on the ground
And nothing in your diver’s past
Had warned you that a diver drowns
When nothing replaces what is missed.

Everything beautiful falls away
Jacknife swandive gainer twist
Muscles drop and skin turns coarse
Even skin the sun had kissed.
You drank the sun down every day
Until the sun no longer existed
And only the drink had any force.

Only the drink had any force
Archer-diver who flew too high
When you were young you never missed
And spit in the sun’s fierce eye.
Later everything burned to ash:
Everything beautiful falls away
Even skin the sun had kissed
Jacknife swandive gainer and twist

II
And now I see your bones in dreams
Turning and twisting below our feet
Finger bones bending out like wings
As once again your body sings
Swandiving slowly through the stone
That sparks your skill and shoulder bones
Layer by layer and over and over
You flash through limestone sand and lava
Feet together and backbone arched
Like an arrow aimed at the devil’s heart
The dead are watching your perfect dive
Clicking their fingers as if alive
High off the board and to hell with the chances
As once again your body dances
Anything done well shines forever only polished by death’s dark weather
Diver diver diving still
Now and forever I praise your skill

Execution

Edward Hirsch



The last time I saw my high school football coach
He had cancer stenciled into his face
Like pencil marks from the sun, like intricate
Drawings on the chalkboard, small x's and o's
That he copied down in a neat numerical hand
Before practice in the morning. By day's end
The board was a spiderweb of options and counters,
Blasts and sweeps, a constellation of players
Shining under his favorite word, Execution,
Underlined in the upper right-hand corner of things.
He believed in football like a new religion
And had perfect unquestioning faith in the fundamentals
Of blocking and tackling, the idea of warfare
Without suffering or death, the concept of teammates
Moving in harmony like the planets — and yet
Our awkward adolescent bodies were always canceling
The flawless beauty of Saturday afternoons in September,
Falling away from the particular grace of autumn,
The clear weather, the ideal game he imagined.
And so he drove us through punishing drills
On weekday afternoons, and doubled our practice time,
And challenged us to hammer him with forearms,
And devised elaborate, last-second plays — a flea-
Flicker, a triple reverse — to save us from defeat.
Almost always they worked. He despised losing
And loved winning more than his own body, maybe even
More than himself. But the last time I saw him
He looked wobbly and stunned by illness,
And I remembered the game in my senior year
When we met a downstate team who loved hitting
More than we did, who battered us all afternoon
With a vengeance, who destroyed us with timing
And power, with deadly, impersonal authority,
Machine-like fury, perfect execution.

from The Night Parade © Alfred A. Knopf, 1989

A Sestina for Michael Jordan

Jay Spoon


The NBA wasn't the same without Michael.
What was THE GAME
Became just a game.
I missed watching him in his hundred dollar shoes
Do his million dollar dunks
After pulling some of his million dollar moves.

Other people tried the same moves,
But they couldn't make them as smoothly as Michael.
They tried to copy his dunks,
To make it more of a GAME.
Some of them even wore his shoes.
But without him it was always, only, a game.

It got boring just watching a game,
Even if there were a few good moves,
And someone was wearing some really nice shoes.
In their hearts the fans knew that without Michael,
There would never be another great GAME—
Just lay-ups and shots from outside, but no great dunks.

Sure, they all tried to do powerful dunks,
But they never made it more than a game.
The thing that would make it more of a GAME
Again were the magnificent moves
Of the fabulous Michael-—
With or without his hundred dollar shoes.

Some say it was the shoes,
And some say it was the dunks,
But all basketball fans loved to watch Michael.
Coaches don't like coaching a game.
They want steals, dunks, exciting moves—
They want a GAME.

The only way it could ever be a GAME
Again is him, wearing his hundred dollar shoes,
Pulling his million dollar moves,
Then going up for his million dollar dunks.
Without him on the starting five it was an amateur's game.
The playoffs, the steals, the fouls are nothing without Michael.

The plain truth is that before Michael there was no GAME.
It was just a predictable game played in boring shoes.
I'm relieved to have him back; I missed those dunks and moves.

The Double Play

Robert Wallace


In his sea-lit
distance, the pitcher winding
like a clock about to chime comes down with

the ball, hit
sharply, under the artificial
bank of lights, bounds like a vanishing string

over the green
to the shortstop magically
scoops to his right whirling above his invisible

shadows
in the dust redirects
its flight to the running poised second baseman

pirouettes
leaping, above the slide, to throw
from mid-air, across the colored tightened interval,

to the leaning-
out first baseman ends the dance
drawing it disappearing into his long brown glove

stretches. What
is too swift for deception
is final, lost, among the loosened figures

jogging off the field
(the pitcher walks), casual
in the space where the poem has happened.

First Love

Carl Linder


Before sixteen
I was fast
enough to fake
my shadow out
and I could read
every crack and ripple
in that patch of asphalt.
I owned
the slanted rim
knew
the dead spot in the backboard.
Always the ball
came back.
Every day I loved
to sharpen
my shooting eye,
waiting
for the touch.
Set shot, jump shot,
layup, hook—
after a while
I could feel
the ball hungering
to clear
the lip of the rim,
the two of us
falling through.