Aesthetics [ Novel for this unit is The Old Man and The Sea ]
See also: http://www.oldmansea.com/gallery/index.htm
[ movie information, trailers ]
http://www.bookrags.com/notes/oms/
[ published study notes ]
Robert Francis
The Base Stealer
Poised between going on and back, pulled
Both ways taut like a tightrope-walker,
Fingertips pointing the opposites,
Now bouncing tiptoe like a dropped ball
Or, like a kid skipping rope, come on, come on,
Running a scattering of steps sidewise,
How he teeters, skitters, tingles, teases,
Taunts them, hovers like an ecstatic bird,
He’s only flirting, Crowd him, Crowd him,
Delicate, delicate, delicate, delicate—Now
Milton Acorn
The Fights
What an elusive target
the brain is! Set up
like a coconut on a flexible stem
it has 101 evasions.
A twisted nod slues a punch
a thin gillette's width
past a brain, or
a rude brush-cut to the chin
tucks one brain safe under another.
Two of these targets are
set up to be knocked down
for 25 dollars or a million.
In that TV picture in the parlor
the men, who linked move to move
in a chancy dance
are abstractions only.
Come to ringside, with two
experts in there. See
each step or blow pivoted,
balanced and sudden as gunfire.
See muscles wriggle, shine
in sweat like windshield rain.
In stinking dancehalls, in
the forums of small towns,
punches are cheaper but
still pieces of death.
For the brain's the target
with its hungers
and code of honour. See
in those stinking towns,
with long counts, swindling judges,
how fury ends with the last gong.
No matter who's the cheated one
they hug like a girl and a man.
It's a craft and
the body rhythmic and terrible,
the game of struggle.
We need something of its nature
but not this;
for the brain's the target
and round by round it's whittled
til nothing's left to a man
but a jerky bun, humming
with a gentleness less than human.
Arnold Adoff
Point Guard
You bring the ball down the court.
The pick is set.
The play is set. The movement of
the ball
is faster
than all
the defensive
hands and heads,
and you
get free.
You pass into the big girl
at the key. She turns
and
shoots and scores.
The crowd roars.
Scott Blaine
Hockey
The ice is smooth, smooth, smooth.
The air bites to the centre
Of warmth and flesh, and I whirl.
It begins in a game . . .
The puck swims, skims, veers,
Goes leading my vision
Beyond the chasing reach of my stick.
The air is sharp, steel-sharp.
I suck needles of breathing,
And feel the players converge.
It grows to a science . . .
We clot, break, drive,
Electrons in motion
In the magnetic pull of the puck.
The play is fast, fierce, tense.
Sticks click and snap like teeth
Of wolves on the scent of a prey.
It ends in the kill . . .
I am one of the pack in a mad,
Taut leap of desperation
In the wild, slashing drive for the goal.
Edward Hirsch
EXECUTION
The last time I saw my high school football coach
He had cancer stenciled into his face
Like pencil marks from the sun, like intricate
Drawings on the chalkboard, small x's and o's
That he copied down in a neat numerical hand
Before practice in the morning. By day's end
The board was a spiderweb of options and counters,
Blasts and sweeps, a constellation of players
Shining under his favorite word, Execution,
Underlined in the upper right-hand corner of things.
He believed in football like a new religion
And had perfect, unquestioning faith in the fundamentals
Of blocking and tackling, the idea of warfare
Without suffering or death, the concept of teammates
Moving in harmony like the planets - and yet
Our awkward adolescent bodies were always cancelling
The flawless beauty of Saturday afternoons in September,
Falling away from the particular grace of autumn,
The clear weather, the ideal game he imagined.
And so he drove us through punishing drills
On weekday afternoons, and doubled our practice time,
And challenged us to hammer him with forearms,
And devised elaborate, last-second plays - a fleaFlicker, a triple reverse - to save us from defeat.
Almost always they worked. Despised losing
And loved winning more than his own body, maybe even
More than himself. But the last time I saw him
He looked wobbly and stunned by illness,
And I remembered the game in my senior year
When we met a downstate team who loved hitting
More than we did, who battered us all afternoon
With a vengeance, who destroyed us with timing
And power, with deadly, impersonal authority,
Machine-like fury, perfect execution.
Robert Wallace
The Double Play
In his sea lit
distance, the pitcher winding
like a clock about to chime comes down with
the ball, hit
sharply, under the artificial
banks of lights, bounds like a vanishing string
over the green
to the shortstop magically
scoops to his right whirling above his invisible
shadows
in the dust redirects
its flight to the running poised second baseman
pirouettes
leaping, above the slide, to throw
from mid-air, across the colored tightened interval,
to the leaningout first baseman ends the dance
drawing it disappearing into his long brown glove
stretches. What
is too swift for deception
is final, lost among the loosened figures
jogging off the field
(the pitcher walks), casual
in the space where the poem has happened.
Robert Francis
Catch
Two boys uncoached are tossing a poem together,
Overhand, underhand, backhand, sleight of hand, every hand,
Teasing with attitudes, latitudes, interludes, altitudes,
High, make him fly off the ground for it, low, make him stoop,
Make him scoop it up, make him almost-as-possible miss it,
Fast, let him sting from it, now, now fool him slowly,
Anything, everything tricky, risky, nonchalant,
Anything under the sun to outwit the prosy,
Over the tree and the long sweet cadence down,
Over his head, make him scramble to pick up the meaning,
And now, like a posy, a pretty one plump in his hands.
Phil George
Make Me a Man
Ah, my first slain deer!
You were swift and sure,
But Grandfather’s arrows,
Piercing straight,
Have met their mark.
Rejoice! Mother Earth’s gift Your frisky life - is now returned.
In you I cup my palms
To drink your blood, rich-red,
Warm as the Sun noon-high.
Buck, make me a man.
Round my ankles, around again,
I will string black hooves.
May I dance your grace,
Bound through light-pintoed forests.
Her hands, soft and loving,
My Mother will prepare
Your velvet skin, quivering flesh.
Near your heart, still throbbing,
I partake and now become
Warm-hearted, strong, alert.
Buck, make me a man.
(from The Whispering Wind, 1972)