18 Sports poems

The reception's not bad, across 50 years, though his voice has lost its boot-camp timbre. He's in his 80's now and, in a recent photo, looks it, so bald and pale and hard to see behind the tallowing of flesh. Posing with friends, he's the only one who has to sit—the man three of us couldn't pin. "The Hugger," they christened him before my class arrived— for his bearlike shape and his first name, Hugh. He fostered even us, the lowly track squad. "Mr. Morrison," I still call him. "You were the speedster on the team, a flash," he recalls with a chuckle. That's where his memory of me fades. And what have I retained of him beyond the nickname, voice, and burly shape? The rest could be invention: memory and desire's sleight-of-hand as we call up those we think we've known, to chat about the old days and the weather, bum hips and cholesterol, our small talk numbing as a dial tone, serious as prayer.

It’s up and away from our work to-day, For the breeze sweeps over the down; And it’s hey for a game where the gorse blossoms flame, And the bracken is bronzing to brown. With the turf ’neath our tread and the blue overhead, And the song of the lark in the whin; There’s the flag and the green, with the bunkers between— Now will you be over or in? The doctor may come, and we’ll teach him to know A tee where no tannin can lurk; The soldier may come, and we’ll promise to show Some hazards a soldier may shirk; The statesman may joke, as he tops every stroke, That at last he is high in his aims; And the clubman will stand with a club in his hand That is worth every club in St. James’. The palm and the leather come rarely together, Gripping the driver’s haft, And it’s good to feel the jar of the steel And the spring of the hickory shaft. Why trouble or seek for the praise of a clique? A cleek here is common to all; And the lie that might sting is a very small thing When compared with the lie of the ball. Come youth and come age, from the study or stage, From Bar or from Bench—high and low! A green you must use as a cure for the blues— You drive them away as you go. We’re outward bound on a long, long round, And it’s time to be up and away: If worry and sorrow come back with the morrow, At least we’ll be happy to-day.

Atop his exhausted buggy with its rusted wheels and now-stuck key, one boot missing, a faded jersey, the bill of his cap cracked off, he sits behind a nicked brown horse that once flicked its tail, clattered around planked floor or rug when the buggy was wound after school by children who've since fallen behind him, white-haired or gone, as he still waves the flopping spring of his crop, still stares through dimming goggles, gathering gray ribbons of dust in his silent, frozen race down an ever-unfurling track, hunched to win, leaving far back all claps and laughter, his once-smooth face scarred and pitted, just the white fleck of a smile now, more a sneer, his empty fists on the reins of air still holding tight.

I.e., the kind of   verse That doesn’t try to force People to their knees (Seeing as it sees To people’s being thrown By forces of   their own).

Each of them must have terrified his parents by being so big, obsessive and exact so young, already gone and leaving, like a big tipper, that huge changeling’s body in his place. The prince of bone spurs and bad knees. The year I first saw them play Malone was a high school freshman, already too big for any bed, 14, a natural resource. You have to learn not to apologize, a form of vanity. You flare up in the lane, exotic anywhere else. You roll the ball off fingers twice as long as your girlfriend’s. Great touch for a big man, says some jerk. Now they’re defunct and Moses Malone, boy wonder at 19, rises at 20 from the St. Louis bench, his pet of a body grown sullen as fast as it grew up. Something in you remembers every time the ball left your fingertips wrong and nothing the ball can do in the air will change that. You watch it set, stupid moon, the way you watch yourself in a recurring dream. You never lose your touch or forget how taxed bodies go at the same pace they owe, how brutally well the universe works to be beautiful, how we metabolize loss as fast as we have to.

That quality of the great boxers to be able to stand there and take shots, gargle with firewater, encounter intoxication at sub- and supra-atomic levels, to leave one’s sandals at the crater’s lip like Empedocles, and descend, not say: I’ll be back, not think: fifty-fifty, to vacate molehills when dwarves want space to grow, to dine alone, indivisible, and able to renounce your victory— a hymn to that man.

the Chinaman said don’t take the hardware and gave me a steak I couldn’t cut (except the fat) and there was an ant circling the coffee cup; I left a dime tip and broke out a stick of cancer, and outside I gave an old bum who looked about the way I felt, I gave him a quarter, and then I went up to see the old man strong as steel girders, fit for bombers and blondes, up the green rotten steps that housed rats and past the secretaries showing leg and doing nothing and the old man sat there looking at me through two pairs of glasses and a vacation in Paris, and he said, Kid, I hear you been takin’ Marylou out, and I said, just to dinner, boss, and he said, just to dinner, eh? you couldn’t hold that broad’s pants on with all the rivets on 5th street, and please remember you are a shipping clerk, I am the boss here and I pay these broads and I pay you. yes, sir, I said, and I felt he was going to skip it but he slid my last check across the desk and I took it and walked out past all the lovely legs, the skirts pulled up to the ass, Marylou’s ass, Ann’s ass, Vicki’s ass, all of them, and I went down to the bar and George said whatya gonna do now, and I said go to Russia or Hollywood Park, and I looked up in time to see Marylou come in, the long thin nose, the delicate face, the lips, the legs, the breasts, the music, the talk the love the laughing and she said I quit when I found out and the bastard got down on his knees and cried and kissed the hem of my skirt and offered me money and I walked out and he blubbered like a baby. George, I said, another drink, and I put a quarter in the juke and the sun came out and I looked outside in time to see the old bum with my quarter and a little more luck that had turned into a happy wine-bottle, and a bird even flew by cheep cheep, right there on Eastside downtown, no kidding, and the Chinaman came in for a quickie claiming somebody had stolen a spoon and a coffee cup and I leaned over and bit Marylou on the ear and the whole joint rocked with music and freedom and I decided that Russia was too far away and Hollywood Park just close enough.

Today I became King of the Court w/out a diamond- encrusted crown thrust upon my sweaty head. Instead my markings of royalty were the t-shirt draping my body like a robe soaked in champagne & the pain in my right knee — a sign of a battle endured, my will tested & bested by none as the ball flew off my hands as swift as an arrow toward the heart of a target — my fingers ringless yet feeling like gold.