Philip Booth
First Lesson
Lie back, daughter, let your head
be tipped back in the cup of my hand.
Gently, and I will hold you. Spread
your arms wide, lie out to the stream
and look high at the gulls. A deadman’s float is face down. You will dive
and swim soon enough where this tidewater
ebbs to the sea. Daughter, believe
me, when you tire on the long thrash
to your island, lie up, and survive.
As you float now, where I held you
and let go, remember when fear
cramps your heart what I told you:
lie gently and wide to the light-year
stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.
Robert Francis
Pitcher
His art is eccentricity, his aim
How not to hit the mark he seems to aim at,
His passion how to avoid the obvious,
His technique how to vary the avoidance.
The others throw to be comprehended. He
Throws to be a moment misunderstood.
Yet not too much. Not errant, arrant, wild,
But every seeming aberration willed.
Not to, yet still, still to communicate
Making the batter understand too late.
Adrien Stoutenburg
Sky Diver
Grotesque, jumping out
like a clother frog, helmet and glasses,
arms and legs wading the sky,
feet flapping before the cloth flower opens;
Then suspended, poised,
an exclamation point upside-down
and going down, swaying over corn and creeks
and highways scribbled
over the bones of fish and eagles.
There is the interim between air and earth,
time to study steeples
and the underwings of birds going over
before the unseen chasm,
the sudden jaw open and hissing.
Lying here after the last jump
I see how fanatic roots are,
how moles breathe through darkness,
how deep the earth can be.
Richard Lattimore
Sky Diving
They step from the high plane and begin to tumble
Down. Below is the painted ground, above
Is bare sky. They do not fumble
With the catch, but only fall; drop sheer; begin to move
In the breakless void; stretch and turn, freed
From pressure; stand in weightless air
And softly walk across their own speed;
Gather and group, these dropping bundles, where
The neighbor in the sky stands, reach, touch
And clasp hands, separate and swim
Back to station (did swimmer ever shear such
Thin water?) falling still. Now at last pull the slim
Cord. Parasols bloom in the air, slow
The swift sky-fall. Collapsed tents cover
The ground. They rise up plain people now.
Their little sky-time is over.
Robert Francis
Watching Gymnasts
(for P.T.)
Competing not so much with one another
As with perfection
They follow follow as voices in a fugue
A severe music.
Something difficult they are making clear
Like the crack teacher
Demonstrating their paradigms until
The dumb see.
How flower-light they toss themselves, how light
The toss and fall
and flower-light, precise and arabesque
Let their praise be.
Robert Francis
High Diver
How deep is his duplicity who in a flash
Passes from resting bird to flying bird to fish,
Who momentarily is sculpture, then all motion,
Speed and splash, then climbs again to contemplation.
He is the archer who himself is bow and arrow.
He is the upper-under-world-commuting hero.
His downward going has the air of sacrifice
To some dark seaweed-bearded seagod face to face.
Or goddess. Rippling and responsive lies the water
For him to contemplate, then powerfully to enter.
Richard Armour
Good Sportsmanship
Good sportsmanship we hail, we sing,
It’s always pleasant when you spot it.
There’s only one unhappy thing:
You have to lose to prove you’ve got it.
Charles Smith
400-Meter Freestyle
Oh shit! Why me?
As butterflies progress from stem through whole.
The gun ... better go, is this what I’ve been waiting for?
...... 15 to go.
100 meters good and quick,
But the dark enemy builds with every turn.
Technique, the watchword, fill the void and ease the growing pain.
Think, pull harder/pull at all, the body gone astray
Painful streamers stem to stern, the teeth ... they even ache.
Breath in spurts, why won’t it come?
Is this my lasting fate?
Faces, are they laughing or know they my domain.
The dark piano descending from on high,
Atlas, you would buckle from the strain.
Celestial lights in buffered brilliance ease a quick demise,
Flash. The heart gone numb, the limbs unwilling,
A ping-pong ball caught between ever-weakening gods.
The ebb and flow have gone, on guts alone I strive,
Sides heaving. The wall, O God! I’m finished.
George Abbe
The Passer
Dropping back with the ball ripe in my palm,
Grained and firm as the flesh of living charm.
I taper and coil myself down, raise arm to fake,
running a little, seeing my targets emerge
Like quail above a wheat field’s golden lake.
In boyhood I saw my mother knit my warmth
With needles that were straight. I learned to feel
The passage of the bullet through the bore,
Its vein of flight between my heart and deer
Whose terror took the pulse of my hot will.
I learned how wild geese slice arcs from hanging pear
Of autumn noon; how the thought of love cleaves home,
And fists, with fury’s ray, can lay a weakness bare,
And instinct’s eye can mine fish under foam.
So as I run and weigh and measure and test,
The light kindles on helmets, the angry leap;
But secretly, coolly, as though stretching a hand to his chest,
I lay the ball in the arms of my planing end
As true as metal, as deftly as surgeon’s wrist.