Sports & Outdoor Activities

don’ t ever get the idea I am a poet; you can see me
at the racetrack any day half drunk
betting quarters, sidewheelers and straight thoroughs,
but let me tell you, there are some women there
who go where the money goes, and sometimes when you
look at these whores these onehundreddollar whores
you wonder sometimes if nature isn’ t playing a joke
dealing out so much breast and ass and the way
it’ s all hung together, you look and you look and
you look and you can’ t believe it; there are ordinary women

I
From the false summit, coxcomb-cum-arête,
cool thermals underscore our frailties,
past edges where our wingless feet are set
and the long look down dilutes the evergreens.
As sandstone ends, the world of ghosts begins —
they sometimes rise up still in dreams, my love.
With one hand firm, I step onto the skin
of the abyss, embracing what’ s above
and severing spent ties to the scree below.
The filtered light turns lichen eerie green,
ushering in a world we hardly know,

I worked the river’ s slick banks, grabbling
in mud holes underneath tree roots.
You’ d think it would be dangerous,
but I never came up with a cooter
or cottonmouth hung on my fingertips.
Occasionally, though, I leapt upright,
my fingers hooked through the red gills
of a mudcat. And then I thrilled
the thrill my father felt when he

I spit my smack,

Jim slugs his Jack,

Rob stews his lack,

Carey prepares his rack,

herons hunker on blowdowns,

deer wait on high moon for their rounds,

and the campfire

might as well be an empire

we all

watch dissolve

(in the slough, a carp roll, a splash)

into ash.

The unicorn is an easy prey: its horn
in the maiden’ s lap is an obvious
twist, a tamed figure — like the hawk
that once roamed free, but sits now, fat and hooded,
squawking on the hunter’ s wrist. It’ s easy
to catch what no longer captures
the mind, long since woven in,
a faded tapestry on a crumbling wall
made by the women who wore keys
at their waists and in their sleep came
hot dreams of wounded knights left bleeding

Sometimes you watch them going out to sea
On such a day as this, in the worst of weathers,
Their boat holding ten or a dozen of them,
In black rubber suits crouched around the engine housing,
Tanks of air, straps and hoses, and for their feet
Enormous flippers.

We liked to stick it in a bb gun and shoot it.
We tattooed with it. We said hallelujah,
the poor man’ s tanning lotion.
Then the frack wells began, something black
capping the water and we got high
watching a green-backed heron die.
We got funny at Clarion, flung
each other’ s underwear into the trees.
Why was it we got naked there
and nowhere else? Maybe we knew
we were getting good and ugly, rusted inside
as the trucks we rode into the water.
Maybe we knew we only appeared

Pure veins of bogus blue-blood and such fancy hungers
~
In the end no surprise of reports of you dying younger than your gods
~
Kicked back in the classic toilet scene
~
With a spike in your arm and twelve large in pocket
~
Thanks to a lucky day scamming the dumb Social Services folks
~
It’ s a human thing, pants at your ankles, leaving unclean
~
Because life’ s road is only one night in a bad motel
~
Harry, you could play basketball in your bare feet, and win
~

When I wake now it’ s below ocherous, saw-ridged
pine beams. Haze streaks all three windows. I look up
at the dog-eared, glossy magazine photo
I’ ve taken with me for years. It gets tacked
like a claim to some new wall in the next place —
Bill Russell & Wilt Chamberlain, one on one
the final game of the 1969 NBA championship,
two hard men snapped elbowing & snatching at a basketball
as if it were a moment one of them might stay inside
forever. I was with
my father the night that game played

sometimes you know
things: once at a
birthday party a little

girl looked at her new party
gloves and said she
liked me, making suddenly the light much
brighter so that the very small

hairs shone above her lip. i felt
stuffed, like a swimming pool, with
words, like i knew something that was in
a great tangled knot. and when we sat