and that’s fact,
like rain falls down
behind the times
lies the land:
keeping count
refusing to lie
Mother of mercy
is this the end of Rico?
Or does the pulse of desire
that lifted him up keep racing
through rain-slick streets
like a speeding roadster,
the fates on its tail in hot pursuit.
Flaherty, you bastard,
how easy it is for you to sneer
at ambition extinguished,
you whose only hopes revolve
around slipping the cuffs
on wrists of men with clearer sight,
squeezing the juice from fingers
that have moulded life in all
its uncertainty and rigour,
that have taken chances.
He wound up in the gutter
that he came from, just as you told
the scribblers he would, just
the way your divine plan dictated
he should, but not because
of any blur in his vision,
any failing of his stout heart—
the way you would have had it—
but because of the fundamental
flaw in his logic: sure, be big,
the heavens are vast, stars beyond
counting and man is puny unless
he dares to stand on tiptoe
and push his hand beyond his reach.
Sure, Rico, be a big shot,
the way the egg stains on your plate predict, but don’t you dare spit on the dance, or step on the toes of the dancer.
for Charlie Niehuis
Luis José Mongi, last man executed
in the United States before the high court
blew the whistle, gassed June 27, 1967,
in Canon City, willed his corneas
to two convicts, one at Buena Vista,
the other to Rick Gardner, hospital orderly
at Canon who’d done him kindnesses,
a trustee who’d embezzled clinic funds,
hands shaking with blindness closing in
the way death sniffed around at Jose’s heels,
“I won’t need them anymore,” he told
the warden, Big Jim Patterson, who
would pull the switch hissing in the gas,
flip to the end. He’d beaten his
common-law wife to death with his hands.
Patterson took sick, wound up
in hospital, and called for Gardner
to be brought from the pen to look
after him, doze in a hard-backed chair
beside the bed through the night
when ghosts of José and other spirits
came back to dance their death jigs
around him, the twitches of gas
rushing through blood to claim it,
José’s eye in Rick’s head gazing
through the night at Patterson’s face
without rancour, without compassion
but with calm.
Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland, wrote standing up.
—Newspaper Item
Not upright but upstanding,
seeking not after flesh
of young girls but spirit,
his eyes on the heaven above
them rather than within.
This agony he feels,
a love as yet unarticulated,
forced into metaphor the way
icing sugar takes on another life
as the sure hand of the baker
squeezes it through mortar and tube
into hearts and bows, a daintiness
beyond the ken of mere romance,
this agony penetrating to the root
of teeth, rotting the bone.
Standing, yes, of course,
and on tiptoes, the posture
not only of poets but of poetry
itself, standing, all the better to see
the angle of sun
arcing the horizon,
all the closer
to the length of our reach.
Game 6, World Series, Bottom of the 10th, 2 Outs
Those hands
have been very important
for 24 victories this season
and very important for seven innings of this game but now all Roger Clemens can do is fold them and watch.
Thanks for the poetry, Joe,
but the sentiment stinks.
Carter doubles
and Knight singles,
sending him to third
and redeeming himself
for that error in the seventh—
redemption, Joe, that’s the angle—
and Carter scores when a wild pitch
sends Gedman scrambling
and Mookie hits this sputtering grounder
down the first-base line,
an easy out, except something—
God, maybe, that’s what Knight says—
makes Buckner daydream it out
of his glove, spins around to watch it go
with the helplessness of a bartender
feeling the Scotch splash out
of the glass and onto his best shirt—
all this because we don’t quit,
Mookie says in the postgame interview,
we never say die,
and some things are certain
despite