What is there left to praise
in the terrible galloping
of these boys, one into the invisibly
breaking body of another,
like the horseplay of meteors?
Or the sublimated bloodlust
of us lesser physical specimens
it gestures towards, the ceremony
of their brutal waltz across turf,
the ball’s brown leather barely visible
amidst this crowd of darker giants:
our last living myths, demigods
among moths. I played as a kid,
& it was the game’s singular speed
that gave me life, undersized
as I was even for an eleven year-old
who dreamt of end zone dances first
& foremost. Coach counted me as one
of the quicker little men from the very start
—swift as a misunderstanding, or the sucker
-punch that might blossom from it—which meant
I would cut & dip under any full-on blow
to the chest I saw coming, & when I couldn’t
was content to let that aching power
through me, thinking this, all by itself,
was a kind of crystallized boyhood,
this porous wall between suffering
& camaraderie, the day Davon runs
me over at practice, autumn air lifting
from my body like a palpable ghost
& I am smiling but not from shock,
rather the recognition that I am yet alive
& this is how it will always be:
the pendulum’s oscillation from delight
to absolute danger, our irreducible human
tenderness not so much an obstruction
as the entire point of the exercise.
& when the game is gone, we will be safer,
yes, & perhaps more civilized,
but I wonder what we will lose
in the way of knowledge held preferentially
in the flesh, how it feels to hover
at the shimmering edge of life
& before you fall, you are endless.