He’s not a fullback.
He can run hard, make guys miss,
go the distance.
It was pretty cool.
He’s an explosive player,
a great way to score.
It’s a great feeling.
We keep handing it off and
those guys keep running.
Lineman Ninkovich
said I’m glad he’s on our team.
He’s about my size.
I wouldn’t want to be hitting that guy.
My Fitbit is winking its four eyes
the fridge the fridge
I was thinking
is sounding
indescribable
liable to be forgotten
for its dearth of novelty
poor broad-shouldered hulk
a pox of dents draped with
enough magnets to sink a
destroyer in the North
Atlantic in January
before dawn
A lake I love
keeps eating my boat
______
Dogs
cough up our bite guards
______
I swallow it all
and still shrink
When Belichick starts
cracking jokes, you know it’s been
a very good day.
You tip your hat to
the big fellow, for how he
ran the ball.
You know even if
we weren’t blocking he was
running someone over.
At dawn we threaded our way
through shifting planes of blue islands,
across a roiling canvas
of wave textures.
The opening up seems to take ages.
By noon The Broads lay before us,
shimmering within sight.
We had nowhere to go but here
and there we were, out in it,
depth in all directions.
There was no word for it, really.
A little company felt good
and then we went home together.
I cried when Corky
wouldn’t take my check.
He saw right away
what an asshole he was being
and pulled a Budweiser
out of the safe.
“There,” he said.
Or maybe it was “Here.”
I’d done the right thing
even though at first I was embarrassed.
I thought my Beetle would be ready
when I came back to Defiance
on the bus.
Couldn’t he see I was honest
with his own eyes?
Everybody in northern Ohio seemed to be
really pissed off all the time–
the statey, the tow-truck driver,
even the guy at the motel.
He kept the hat I left in the closet,
the one I made myself,
all different color suede.
Robby Burns borrowed a pony on this day in 1786
and made his way to Edinburgh.
Later on, his poems cracked up the Railsplitter.
Neither one made any money on the farm, it seems,
and their bad luck with the lasses is well-known.
I started to cry.
The man stopped the Tilt-a-Whirl
because Dad asked him.
I escaped wounding
on that occasion but still
chose psychiatry
over the circus.
But I repeat myself.
Rosie the Riveter chomps
a jumbo ham and rye
and absentmindedly stomps
the Fuehrer in the eye.
Posing as Isaiah did
atop the Sistine wall,
so hot the lunch-pail goddess
that Hitler stands to fall.
A whistling night wind
picks up off the lake
rustling our dinner napkins.
Breakers start rolling in
to pound the rocky shore
in the darkness below.
The day was so calm this is unexpected.
“Better check it out, Pops.”
Sailing tackle rattles on the pipe dock
and Ethan heads down to retrieve it,
his efforts illuminated
by a blast of September lightning.
The roar intensifies
muting the thunder
and I join him, drenched already.
Windward at dock-side
our Boston Whaler bucks wildly
as waves swamp her stern
and crest over the old dock.
Old Whalers never sink
they just take on more and more water,
turning into floating battering rams
twice their ordinary weight.
Kneeling I grab the boat rail
to block the onslaught
while Ethan bails.
The gale drags on
in unrelenting fury.
I don’t want to lose her on the rocks again.
I keep my thoughts to myself.
“Keep bailing!” I yell.
Under my raw knees I feel the dock shudder.
The pipes wobble in the dark
with each sickening blow,
leaning to leeward
as timber begins cracking
under the boat’s assault.
We’re in harm’s way.
Ethan heaves the careening gas tank out of the boat.
In no time the night surf sweeps it off the dock.
“Grab it!” he yells.
I jump in and wade after it,
wrestling with its dusky ruddiness
as lightning flashes around us.
Then the gray bucket blows out of his hands
and vanishes in the wind.
“Get a rope, Dad! I’ll pull her out.”
I dash out of the water with the tank
to untie a clothesline I can barely see.
I want to believe in him.
I know I’m not strong enough to do it.
It’s beyond my grasp.
Ethan does it.
He pulls the old Whaler to safety,
swimming a one-armed sidestroke
out to the mooring buoy
in the seething storm.
Only by the light of day
do we see
two shore-trees blown down.
The lake is still by then,
but I’m numb, blocked up, shaken.
Who likes living in these shades,
when there is nothing in you,
not even yourself?
I summon the face of my despair.
I want to feel gratitude and pride,
to breathe that subtle air
that Odysseus plied
in his blessed desperation
on a wine-dark sea–
man of twists and turns.
His radiance now has risen in my son.
I have no way out, I find,
except in the immensity
we live in:
inside my blocked-up heart,
where his patient strength is my worthiness,
in a love and joy beyond measure.
Jon Wolston's Poetry Archive 