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Poetry Gets Me Hot and Sad

If you're afraid of poetry, or just disgusted by the dearth of lovely lines delineating fallenness and wet dreams, then perk up. Dennis Nurkse is your sub-redemption:

"The Rules of the Game"

A sticky thread between my fingers.

God knows what happened.

I'd been dreaming of baseball--

Dodgers vs. Giants
at Ebbets Field, Snider at bat
hitting .379, a 1-2 fastball
about to nick the inside corner--

then this spasm
and all my pennants
hung slightly crooked.

A breeze blew inside me.
It no longer mattered
if the drive cleared the fence.

Mystery. I asked my mother:

and she sighed and began searching
in the highest shelf of the bookcase.

-from The Fall

"my pennants/ hung slightly crooked"--too good. I hadn't thought, before reading this, how correlated sports and sensuality have been in my life. And maybe not sports in general, but specific, fantastic, sporting moments. Like fighting and sensuality--the daydreams that got me through Shadowlawn Middle School: Wendy sits on the front steps. Robbie and his fish-netted friends sit around her, turn the Bon Jovi up through the jambox. She scoots over. They scoot over. I see her through the Science Lab window, walk evenly down the hall and out to the steps. I say, quietly, "Hello, Wendy," and proceed to jam-box their faces to a more pizzaish state. I wake up, and the top bookshelf is empty.

Posted by ghetto monk at February 4, 2004 10:13 PM | TrackBack