Fall, Nebraska
From Inklings: Poems Old and New. Sandhill Press, 2001.
He wears bull’s bones with hyacinthine curls
above his eyes, the weight of
forever
swinging back and forth between his legs;
he talks offensively about his
upper arms.
In bed, his headphones on, he listens
to a brutal bass for hours, then
rises,
eating on the run. But 30 universities
are interested in him. Even the
governor
has graced his palm. At night, when cruising
Man, that four-block, dim-lit
thoroughfare
of town, the sirens come to him. His fever
climbs, odes written on
his
glands,
the re-tooled motor of his Mustang sings.
It all started gloriously enough in Little
League,
when suffering his faithful parents to come
to him, he stood in trophied
grace along
the third-base line. It was there he
accepted the United Way’s Outstanding
Midget
of the Year. Now a dozen coaches have visited
his home, the gifts are in.
No
tripods
of Homeric gold, no talking stallions, concubines.
These the NCAA denies. Only an
athletic dorm,
un-spartan, and a chance for immortality on
some warm afternoon,
the
bards on high,
his helmet bronzed and blazing in the sun.
Fated by talent, public taste, and
newspapers
which say he’s more important than bodies
terrorized and dumped from
jets, he takes the field.
A current of blood fury courses through his veins,
the outcome’s knotted in his gut,
the
dream
of who he is, and was, in doubt. And who
cares if the kid himself can barely
read,
there are better uses for his breath.
This coliseum’s his home, each coach his
guardian,
and this is his life after death.
Used with the permission of Don Welch